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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 

WALTER PATER 



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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 



WALTER PATER 



BY 

A. C. BENSON 

FELLOW OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1906 

All rights reserved 



insist* 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Conies Received 

^JAY 12 1906 



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No, 

copy b: 



COPYKIGHT, 1906, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1906. 



Nortoooti -press 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

In the absence of any official biography of Walter 
Pater, it has been necessary to collect information as 
to the events of his life from his relatives and friends. 
My thanks are due, in the first place, to Miss Pater 
and Miss Clara Pater, his sisters, who have given me 
the most kind and courteous assistance throughout ; to 
Dr. Shadwell, Provost of Oriel, Pater's oldest friend 
and literary executor, of whose sympathy and interest 
it is impossible to speak too gratefully ; to Dr. Bussell, 
Vice-Principal of Brasenose, who has communicated 
to me many important particulars; to Mr. Herbert 
Warren, President of Magdalene ; to Dr. Daniel, Pro- 
vost of Worcester, and Mrs. Daniel; to Mr. Basil 
Champneys ; to Mr. Humphry Ward, formerly Fellow 
of Brasenose; to Mr. Douglas Ainslie; to Miss Paget 
(Vernon Lee), and others who have put their recollec- 
tions at my disposal ; to Mr. Edmund Gosse, who has 
permitted me to use his published materials; to Mr. 
Howard Sturgis and Mr. C. Fairfax Murray for care- 
ful criticism ; to Miss Beatrice Layman, who has given 
me invaluable help in verification and correction. 

The books and articles which I have consulted, and 
to some of which reference is made in the following 



vi WALTER PATER 

pages, are the original editions of Pater's volumes, of 
various dates, and the Collected Edition of his works, 
edited by Dr. Shadwell, 1902-1904 (Macmillan and 
Co.) ; Essays from the Guardian, privately printed in. 
1896, and since published 1901 (Macmillan and Co.) ; 
A Short History of Modern English Literature, 1898 
(Heinemann) ; Critical Kit-Kats, 1896 (Heinemann), 
and an article in the Dictionary of National Biography, 
1895 (Smith, Elder, and Co.), by Mr. Edmund Gosse; 
Walter Pater, by Mr. Ferris Greenslet, in the Contem- 
porary Men of Letter Series, 1904 (Heinemann) ; an 
essay, Walter Pater, in Studies in Prose and Verse, by 
Mr. Arthur Symons, 1904 (J. M. Dent) ; and an article 
in the Fortnightly Review, " The Work of Mr. Pater," 
by Lionel Johnson, September 1894 (Chapman and 
Hall). 

A. C. B. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Early Life 



CHAPTER II 

27 
Early Writings 



CHAPTER III 

59 
Oxford Life 

CHAPTER IV 

eg 

Marius the Epicurean 

CHAPTER V 

117 
London Life 

CHAPTER VI 

140 
Later Writings 

CHAPTER VII 

178 / 
Personal Characteristics 

. 221 
Index 

vii 



WALTER PATER 



CHAPTER I 

EARLY LIFE 

Very little is recorded and still less is known about 
the pedigree of Pater. It is only in the main line of 
families that are established in ancestral estates, and 
whose home is inherited by a succession of heirs, that 
family traditions are apt to accumulate. 

The name Pater is uncommon in England, and not 
at all uncommon in Holland, the Dutch frequently 
latinising their names ; this, and the fact that a Dutch 
Admiral of that name settled in England at the time 
of William of Orange, made some members of the 
Pater family think they were originally of Dutch 
extraction ; but this has never been verified. In a 
journey through Holland, Walter Pater was much in- 
terested in a picture at Amsterdam, by Van der Heist, 
of archers, with a tablet giving the names of the win- 
ners in a contest of skill j at the top of the list stands 
the name Pater. 

The forefathers of Walter Pater were living at 
Weston-Underwood, near Olney in Buckinghamshire, 
the home of Cowper, in the eighteenth century, and 
some verses in the handwriting of the poet were pre- 
served by their descendants. One of the Olney Paters 
emigrated to America ; and here Richard Glode Pater, 

B 1 



2 WALTER PATER [chap. 

the father of Walter Pater, was born. Early in the 
nineteenth century the household returned to England, 
settling at Shad well, between Wapping and Stepney ; 
and here Richard Pater practised medicine, careless 
of money and success alike, a man of unobtrusive 
benevolence, labouring at the relief of suffering among 
poor people, who often could not afford to pay for his 
advice. Here he married a Miss Hill : four children 
were born to him, two sons, of whom the elder, William 
Thompson Pater, became a doctor and died in 1887, 
and two daughters. Walter Horatio Pater was born 
in 1839, on August 4th. Dr. Richard Pater died so 
early that his famous son could hardly remember him. 
After his death the household moved to Enfield, and 
here at an old house, now demolished, with a big 
garden, in the neighbourhood of Chase Side, the 
children were brought up. This quiet life was varied 
by visits to a place called Fish Hall, near Hadlow in 
Kent, the residence of Walter Pater's cousin and god- 
mother, Mrs. Walter May. 

It is stated in biographical notices of Pater that for 
some generations the sons of the family had been 
brought up as Catholics, the daughters as Anglicans. 
But this has been too much insisted upon ; as a matter 
of fact the Roman Catholicism in the family was of 
late date. Walter Pater's great-grandfather was a 
convert, having married a lady of great piety and 
sweetness, whose mother's maiden name was Gage, 
belonging to an old Roman Catholic family in Suffolk. 
Richard Pater, Walter's father, quitted the Roman 
Church before his marriage, and adopted no particular 
form of faith ; and Walter Pater was brought up as 
an Anglican. 

At the age of fourteen the boy was sent to the 
King's School, Canterbury, where he seems to have 



i.] EARLY LIFE 3 

been regarded at first as idle and backward ; but he 
was popular in spite of an entire indifference to games. 
Not till he entered the sixth form did his intellectual 
ambition awaken. 

It would be interesting to know something of the 
thoughts of this grave, silent, and friendly boy through 
the impressionable years; but, like many boys of 
ability, he was affected by a sensitive shyness, a 
reticence about his inner thoughts. Cheerful, lively, 
chattering children, who too often, alas ! degenerate 
into the bores of later life, can generally talk easily 
and unaffectedly about their tastes and interests, and 
blithely reveal the slender sparkling stream of their 
thoughts. But with boys of perceptive and medita- 
tive temperaments it is mostly far otherwise. They 
find themselves overmastered by feelings which they 
cannot express, and which they are ashamed of trying 
to express for fear of being thought eccentric. Pater 
was always apt to be reticent about his own interior 
feelings, and confided them only to the more imper- 
sonal medium of his writings. He had no taste at any 
time for indulging in reminiscence, and tended rather 
to be the recipient of other people's thoughts, which 
he welcomed and interpreted with ready sympathy, 
than to be garrulous about the details of his own life, 
which, with characteristic humility, he was disposed 
to consider destitute of interest. 

But one trait of character does undoubtedly emerge. 
He was instinctively inclined to a taste for symbolical 
ceremony of every kind. In the family circle he was 
fond of organising little processional pomps, in which 
the children were to move with decorous solemnity. 
He looked forward to taking orders in the Church of 
England ; and this bias was strengthened by a visit 
he paid, as a little boy, to a house of some friends at 



4 WALTER PATER [chap. 

Hursley. There he met Keble, who had a great devo- 
tion to children. Keble took a fancy to the quiet 
serious child, walked with him, and spoke with him 
of the religious life, in a way that made a deep impres- 
sion on the boy's mind, though they never met again. 

There are two of Pater's studies, The Child in the 
House and Emerald Uthwart,with which it is obvious that 
a certain autobiographical thread is interwoven. But 
it is necessary to resist the temptation to take either 
of them as in any sense a literal representation of 
facts. Bather it may be said that Pater's early years 
supplied him with a delicate background of reminis- 
cence, upon which he embroidered a richer ornament 
of dreamful thought, using, in his own phrase, the 
finer sort of memory. 

It is clear, however, that he was instinctively alive 
to impressions of sense, and that his mind was early 
at work observing and apprehending a certain quality 
in things perceived and heard, which he was after- 
wards to recognise as beauty. He had few outbursts 
of high spirits or unreasoning glee; it was rather a 
tranquil current of somewhat critical enjoyment ; but 
he was sensitive to a whole troop of perceptions, of 
which the normal child would hardly be conscious — 
the coolness of dark rooms on hot summer days, the 
carelessly ordered garden, the branching trees, the 
small flowers, so bright of hue, so formal of shape, 
the subtle scents of the old house, the pot-pourri of 
the drawing-room, the aroma of old leather in the 
library ; for it was about the house, the familiar rooms, 
that Pater's memory persistently dwelt, rather than 
on the wider prospect of field and hill. 

There is a beautiful and interesting passage in 
which Pater embalmed his view of the permanence 
of these early impressions: — 



i.] EARLY LIFE 5 

" The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell 
through the air upon them like rain ; while time seemed to 
move ever more slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it 
almost stood still on June afternoons. How insignificant, at 
the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things which 
are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so, in the environ- 
ment of early childhood. How indelibly, as we afterwards 
discover, they affect us ; with what capricious attractions and 
associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the 
smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as ' with lead in the rock 
for ever,' giving form and feature, and as it were assigned house- 
room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and 
thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not 
otherwise." 

But he points out clearly enough that very little 
that is critical is intermingled with the perceptions of 
childhood : — 

" It is false to suppose that a child's sense of beauty is de- 
pendent on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects 
which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to 
be the rule with most of us in later life." 

There were two strains of sentiment which he dis- 
cerned to have chiefly coloured his childish thoughts. 
One was "the visible, tangible, audible loveliness of 
things . . . marking early the activity in him of a 
more than customary sensuousness . . . which might 
lead him, one day, how far ! " 

And then, too, the sorrow and suffering of the world 
came home in dim glimpses to the child, as a thing 
which was inextricably intertwined with the life of men 
and animals alike. There was as yet no attempt to 
harmonise the two dominant strains of feeling ; they 
were the two great facts for him — beauty and sorrow ; 
they seemed so distinct from, so averse to each other, 
sorrow laying her pale hand so firmly on life, withering 



6 WALTER PATER [chap. 

it at its very source, and striking from it what was 
lovely and delectable. And yet he noted the pathetic 
attempt of beauty to reassert itself, as in the violets 
which grew on the child's grave, and drew their sweet- 
ness from sad mortality. And there came too the 
terror of death, the sad incidents of which imprint 
themselves with so sinister a horror on the tender 
mind. "At any time or place, in a moment, the faint 
atmosphere of the chamber of death would be breathed 
around him, and the image with the bound chin, the 
quaint smile, the straight, stiff feet, shed itself across 
the air upon the bright carpet, amid the gayest com- 
pany, or happiest communing with himself." 

These were the dreams of childhood, the unchecked 
visions of the sheltered and secluded home ; at 
Canterbury came a wider, nobler, richer prospect 
of beauty. He found himself in that exquisite, 
irregular city, with its narrow streets ; the mouldering 
gateways leading to the Close, where the huge 
Cathedral rises among a paradise of lawns and gardens ; 
with the ancient clustering houses, of which some con- 
tain the gables and windows of the old monastic 
buildings, while some are mere centos of ancient stone, 
the ruins having been used for a quarry; some of 
mellow brick, with a comfortable Erastian air about 
them, speaking of the settled prosperity of eighteenth- 
century churchmanship ; the whole tenderly harmon- 
ised by sun and rain into a picture of equable, dignified 
English life, so that wherever the eye turned, it fell 
upon some delicate vignette full of grace and colour. 

It is of this period that Emerald Uihwart, that 
strange fanciful story, holds certain reminiscences, 
but reminiscences coloured and tranquillised by the 
backward-looking eye. " If at home there had been 
nothing great, here, to boyish sense, one seems 



i.] EARLY LIFE 7 

diminished to nothing at all, amid the grand waves, 
wave upon wave, of patiently-wrought stone ; the dar- 
ing height, the daring severity, of the innumerable, 
long, upward, ruled lines, rigidly bent just at last, in 
due place, into the reserved grace of the perfect Gothic 
arch ; the peculiar daylight which seemed to come 
from further than the light outside." 

But still it must be borne in mind that all this was 
rather perceived, noted, and accumulated in the boyish 
mind than expressed or even consciously felt. The 
scenes, the surroundings, of boyhood just inscribe them- 
selves upon the mind, which seldom pauses to reflect or 
to criticise ; it is long after, in maturity, with the wist- 
ful and tender sense of the past, that the recollection, 
tranquilly recalled, is tinged with poetry aud sweetness. 
There was little consciousness in Pater's boyish days of 
how deep these things were settling into his mind, and 
still less foreshadowing of the magic power that would 
enable him to recall and express them in melodious 
words. The only definite artistic influence under which 
he is known to have fallen in his school-days is the 
influence of Buskin, whom he read as a boy of nineteen. 
It is possible to trace this influence in Pater's mature 
style ; there is something of the same glowing use of 
words, something of the same charming naivete and 
transparency in the best passages of both ; but whereas 
Buskin is remarkable for prodigality, Pater is remark- 
able for restraint ; Buskin drew his vocabulary from 
a hundred sources, and sent it. pouring down in a bright 
cascade, whereas Pater chose more and more to refine 
his use of words, to indicate rather than to describe. 
Buskin's, in fact, is a natural style and Pater's is an 
artificial one ; but he undoubtedly received a strong 
impulse from Buskin in the direction of ornamen- 
tal expression ; and a still stronger impulse in the 



8 WALTER PATER [chap. 

direction of turning a creative force into the criticism 
of beautiful thiugs — a vein of subjective criticism, 
in fact. 

In June 1858 Pater entered Queen's College, Oxford. 
He was a commoner, but held an exhibition awarded 
him from Canterbury. 

Queen's College was founded in 1340 by Robert 
Eglesfield, a chaplain to Queen Philippa, who largely 
supplemented her priest's endowment. The medi- 
eval buildings have entirely disappeared, and the 
college consists of a great Italian court, designed by 
Hawksmoor, Wren's pupil, with a fine pillared screen 
dividing it from the High Street, and a smaller court 
behind. The Chapel is a stately classical building, 
designed by Wren himself, and considered by him one 
of his most successful works. It is rich with seven- 
teenth-century glass by Van Linge, and dignified wood- 
work. The Library is a magnificent room, with much 
carving by Grinling Gibbons, certain panels of which 
are almost perfect examples of freedom of form with 
an underlying serenity of design. The lofty Hall might 
have come straight out of an Italian picture, and the 
mysterious gallery at the west end, opening by cur- 
tained porches on balconies of delicate ironwork, seems 
designed to be crowded by fantastic smiling persons in 
rich garments. 

It was a definitely ecclesiastical foundation, and pre- 
served a larger number of quaint names and symbolical 
customs than are preserved at other colleges ; such as 
announcing dinner by the sound of the trumpet, and 
the retention of the name Taberdar for scholars. Pater 
lived a very secluded and unobtrusive life in the back 
quadrangle, associating with a few friends ; he worked 
at classics with moderate diligence, amusing himself with 
metaphysics, which even in his school-days had begun 



i] EARLY LIFE 9 

to exercise an attraction over him. There is nothing 
which would lead one to suppose that his thoughts 
turned in the direction of either art or literature. It 
has been stated in some notices of his life that Jowett 
discovered Pater's abilities, and gave him gratuitous 
teaching. From this it would seem to be inferred 
that Pater found a pecuniary difficulty in providing 
himself with adequate instruction, which was not the 
case. The explanation is simply that Jowett, as Pro- 
fessor of Greek, offered to look over the Greek com- 
positions and essays of any members of his class who 
cared to submit them to him, and Pater took advan- 
tage, like many other men, of the offer. Jowett 
indeed divined a peculiar quality in Pater's mind, 
saying to him one day, in one of those lean simple 
phrases that seem to have exercised so remarkably 
stimulating a power over his pupils' minds, " I think 
you have a mind that will come to great eminence." 
But Pater failed to do himself justice in his examina- 
tions, taking only a second-class in the Final Classical 
Schools in 1862. For a couple of years he lived in 
lodgings in High Street, and took pupils. In 1864 
he was elected to a Fellowship at Brasenose, where 
he immediately went into residence. 

Pater's mother had died while he was at school 
at Canterbury. His aunt, an unmarried sister of his 
father, came to take charge of the family in her 
place. When Pater went up to Oxford, his aunt 
took his sisters to Heidelberg and Dresden, to com- 
plete their education, and it was there that Pater 
spent his long vacations. But he made no German 
acquaintances, and lived a life of quiet work and 
interior speculation; he did not even acquire a con- 
versational knowledge of German. In 1869 he took 
a tour in Italy with Mr. Charles Lancelot Shadwell, 



10 WALTER PATER [chap. 

his closest and most intimate friend. They visited 
Ravenna, Pisa, and Florence, and it was then that 
art became for him the chief preoccupation of his 
inner life. 

Up till this time there is little hint of the line on 
which he was afterwards to develop. Such attempts as 
he had made in the direction of literary expression were 
mostly destroyed by himself at a later date ; the only 
thing which survives is a curious little study called 
Diaphaneity, which is dated July 1864, and is now in- 
cluded in the Miscellaneous Studies. This was written as 
a paper to be read aloud to a small society called the 
" Old Mortality," of which he was a member, and 
to which many remarkable men belonged. The germ 
of his later writings can here be clearly discerned, but 
there is a certain dry compression about the little 
essay which is very unlike the later ornate manner. 
It is crammed almost too full of thought, and the evolu- 
tion has a certain uneasiness arising from the omission 
of easy transitions. In the essay Pater endeavours to 
indicate a certain type of character presenting neither 
breadth nor colour, but a narrow and potent sincerity. 

" That fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral 
nature refine themselves to the burning point." " It seeks to 
value everything at its eternal worth, not adding to it, or 
taking from it, the amount of influence it may have for or 
against its own special scheme of life." 

" Its ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or in- 
tegrity, that instinctively prefers what is direct and clear, lest 
one's own confusion and intransparency should hinder the 
transmission from without of light that is not yet inward." x 

1 One circumstance, which gives the piece a special and 
personal interest, deserves to be mentioned. It is not dis- 
puted that the temperament there indicated was carefully 
delineated from Pater's intimate friend, C. L. Shadwell, now 
Provost of Oriel. 



I.] EARLY LIFE 11 

In such strict compressed sentences Pater traces his 
ideal of intellectual and moral sincerity ; but the value 
of the paper is that, in the first place, it shows a power 
of acute and subtle psychological analysis, and in the 
second place it expresses with difficult wistfulness the 
ideal with which the young student meant to approach 
the world. To that ideal he was unfailingly true. He 
meant to know, to weigh, to consider; not to see 
things through the eyes of others, but to follow step 
by step the golden clue that ran for him through the 
darkness. It indicates a fearlessness, an independence 
of mind, which few achieve so early, and which fewer 
still have the patience to follow out. 

In these years Pater's chief interest, apart from his 
prescribed work, was in philosophy, which naturally led 
him to the study of German authors ; and here he fell 
under the influence of Goethe. Goethe came to be for 
Pater the " true illustration of the speculative temper," 
"one to whom every moment of life brought its contri- 
bution of experimental, individual knowledge; by 
whom no touch of the world of form, colour, and 
passion was disregarded." 

It is necessary to bear in mind that there were two 
distinct strains in Pater's mind : there was on the one 
hand a strong impulse towards transcendental philo- 
sophy, a desire to discern as far as possible the abso- 
lute principles of life and being. He hankered after a 
certain clearness of view, a theory which could explain 
for him the strange confusion of the intellectual life, 
where so many currents of the human spirit seem 
not so much to blend, as to check and oppose each 
other. The human mind seems to be haunted by a 
conception of ultimate truth, and to deal in intuitions 
which appear to hint at a possible solution ; but the 
higher in the scale of perception that a mind is, the 



12 WALTER PATER [chap. 

more complex are the influences which, seem to dis- 
tract it. 

On the other hand there was a strong attraction 
to precise and definite types of beauty. Pater was 
checked in his metaphysical researches by his acute 
sense of the relativity of thought, by his apprehen- 
sion of the sacredness of beauty, by his deep sensi- 
tiveness to art. What he longed for was a reasonable 
formula, which could connect the two, which could 
make him feel that the same law was at work both in 
the region of beauty and in the region of philosophical 
truth. "It is no vague scholastic abstraction," he 
wrote, " that will satisfy the speculative instinct in our 
modern minds. Who would change the colour or 
curve of a rose-leaf for that . . . colourless, formless, 
intangible being Plato put so high ? " 

The influence of his metaphysical studies is seen in 
his first published writing, a fragment on Coleridge, 
considered as a philosopher, which appeared in the 
Westminster Review in 1866. This was afterwards re- 
printed in the Appreciations in 1889, with a passage 
added on the poetry of Coleridge, which he had contri- 
buted, in 1883, as a biographical introduction to the 
selections from the poet in Ward's English Poets. 

The first part of this essay traces the retrograde 
character of the philosophy of Coleridge, his rebellion 
against the patient generalisation of the scientific 
method. There are flashes of acute criticism, as when 
he points out that the chief faults of Coleridge's philo- 
sophical writings are in the first place their roughness, 
their lack of form ; and in the second place the writer's 
excess of seriousness, " a seriousness arising not from 
any moral principle, but from a misconception of the 
perfect manner." 

No doubt the reason why Coleridge as a philosopher 



i.] EAELY LIFE 13 

won such an influence in England was that he joined 
to a deep grasp of transcendental metaphysics a some- 
what tame acceptance of the orthodox religious posi- 
tion. Here emerges the essential weakness of his 
philosophy. He accepted as reasonable assumptions 
the orthodox views of revealed religion. He made no 
attempt to treat in a critical spirit the sources through 
which this revelation was made; the result was that 
the religious writers of the day — and it must be borne 
in mind that the main current of intellectual interest 
was in Coleridge's time religious rather than philo- 
sophical — welcomed Coleridge as a man who had 
sounded the depths of metaphysical and speculative 
inquiry, and had returned from his quest not a sceptic 
nor a rationalist, but a convinced Christian. After 
such a triumph for religious feeling, his lesser hetero- 
doxies were eagerly forgiven. 

Pater does not dwell upon this side of Coleridge's 
influence ; but there is no doubt that it deeply affected 
his own religious thought. He is believed at this time 
to have cherished the scheme of becoming a Unitarian 
minister; his metaphysical studies did not in fact 
destroy his strong religious instinct, but only drew 
him away for a time from the spell of association 
and tradition which the Church exercised over him, 
and to the domain of which he was eventually to 
return. 

The essay on Coleridge is mainly interesting, not 
for its substance, subtle as it is, but for the fact that 
it reveals the beginnings of Pater's style. It is clear 
that he is struggling hard with the German influence; 
the terminology is technical, and a vague and dreamy 
emotion seems to be moving somewhat stiffly in the 
grip of metaphysical ideas ; the sentences are long 
and involved, and there is a great lack of lucidity of 



14 WALTER PATER [chap. 

construction, combined with a precision of expression, 
that produces a blurred and bewildering effect upon 
the mind. 

It is impossible to believe that one who, like Pater, 
felt so strongly the sensuous influence of external 
beauty in art and nature, can have lingered long 
among abstractions. He never lost his interest in 
philosophy, but it became for him not so much a 
region into which he escaped from the actual world, 
as a region in which he could bring into line the vague 
suggestions of beauty and the laws of pure thought. 
He felt that beauty, while it haunted him, also dis- 
tracted him ; and while he could not resist its appeal 
to his emotional nature, he longed to be able to stand 
above it as well, and to see how it harmonised with 
more abstract conceptions ; to arrive, indeed, at a cer- 
tain serenity and tranquillity of thought, in which the 
perception of beauty might set, as it were, a sweet and 
solemn descant to the reasonable and sustained melody 
of the intellectual ideal. 

Contact with practical life, together with his first 
sight of Italian art, turned Pater's thoughts gradually 
away from metaphysical speculation ; and the final 
conversion came in his discovery of Otto Jahn's Life 
of Winckelmann, which opened to him a new pros- 
pect. The teaching of G-oethe had begun to seem 
too passionate, too sensual; the idealism of Ruskin 
degenerated too much into sentiment, and forfeited 
balance and restraint ; Hegel and Schelling were too 
remote from life, with all its colour, all its echoes ; 
but in Winckelmann he found one who could devote 
himself to the passionate contemplation of beauty, 
without any taint or grossness of sense; who was 
penetrated by fiery emotion, but without any dalli- 
ance with feminine sentiment; whose sensitiveness 



j -j EARLY LIFE 15 

was preternaturally acute, while his conception was 
cool and firm. Here, then, he discovered, or appeared 
to himself to discover, a region in which beauty and 
philosophy might unite in a high impassioned mood of 
sustained intellectual emotion. 

Brasenose College, with which Pater's life was to be 
identified, is one of the sternest and severest in aspect 
of Oxford colleges. It has no grove or pleasaunce to 
frame its sombre antiquity in a setting of colour and 
tender freshness. Its black and blistered front looks 
out on a little piazza occupied by the stately moulder- 
ins dome of the Radcliffe Library ; beyond is the solid 
front of Hertford, and the quaint pseudo-Gothic court 
of All Souls. To the north lies a dark lane, over the 
venerable wall of which looms the huge chestnut of 
Exeter, full in spring of stiff white spires of heavy- 
scented bloom. To the south a dignified modern 
wing built long after Pater's election, overlooks the 
bustling High Street. To the west the college lies back 
to back with the gloomy and austere courts of Lincoln 
There is no sense of space, of leisureliness, of ornament, 
about the place ; it rather looks like a fortress of study. 
You enter the first court by a gateway under a 
tower. The interior of the buildings is still more 
sombre, with the smoke-stained walls and gables ot 
friable stone. The Hall is on the south side, a lofty, 
dark-panelled place, with some good portraits. Be- 
yond the Hall on the first floor is the Common-room, 
whither the Fellows adjourn after Hall, and which by 
day answers the purpose of a club-room. This is also 
an ample panelled chamber, with an air about it ot 
grave and solid comfort. 

The further court, to the south, which is enteied 
by a flagged arched passage under the southern wing 
of the first court, is an irregular place, having been 



16 WALTER PATER [chap. 

of late years considerably extended. The Chapel at 
once attracts the eye. It is a Renaissance building, of 
the same crumbling Headington stone, with broad 
classical pilasters, and windows of a clumsy Gothic 
tracery. The designer appears to have wished the 
tone to be classical, with a Gothic flavour. The very 
incongruity has a certain sober charm. A beautiful 
Renaissance porch admits to the ante-chapel; a fine 
classical screen of dark wood, with large smooth 
columns, supports an organ, into the carved woodwork 
of which are worked gilded swans and peacocks. 
There is a noble classical western window, under 
which is set the memorial to Pater. This is not 
wholly satisfactory, looking like a little tray of coins. 
It has four medallions — Leonardo, Michel Angelo, 
Dante, and Plato — with a fifth in the centre containing 
a bas-relief of Pater's head ; but the expression is irrit- 
able and the chin is exaggeratedly protruded. The 
mottoes above and below, in uncial Greek, are beautiful 
and appropriate : fiC ■ $IAOGO<l>IAS • OYOHC • THC- 
MEITOTHO • MOYCIKHG (since philosophy is the 
greatest music) above ; and OCA • EOTIN • AAH©H • 
OOA • OEMNA • OOA • ArA©A below (whatsoever 
things are true, whatsoever things are holy, whatsoever 
things are pure). 

The interior of the chapel has the same simple 
gravity. There is a plain marble reredos; the stall- 
work is Jacobean of dark wood, the heavy cornice 
and the balls which serve for poppy-heads being con- 
spicuous. There is a great brazen chandelier and a 
noble eagle lectern. The roof, taken from the destroyed 
chapel of St. Mary's College, which stood on the site 
now occupied by Frewin Hall, is of a rich Gothic, 
brightly painted. The east window is a fine piece of 
classical glass, but there are some poor ecclesiastical 



i.] EARLY LIFE 17 

windows at the side ; of which it may be recorded that 
when the question of replacing them was mooted, Pater 
said that he would not have them removed, as they 
provided a document of taste. The velvet cushions, 
the tall prayer-books, give a dignified eighteenth- 
century air to the whole. 

There is something in these classical Oxford chapels 
which lends a curious and distinct savour to the offices 
of religion. It has been said that Gothic represents 
the aspiration of man to God, classical architecture the 
tabernacling of God with men. There is a species of 
truth in the statement. But it would perhaps be truer 
to say that in Gothic one sees the uncultivated instinct 
for beauty feeling its way out of barbarism into a 
certain ecclesiastical and traditional grace. But the 
classical enshrinement of religious worship seems to 
hint at a desire to bring the older and loftier triumphs 
of the human mind, the Greek and Boman spirit, into 
the service of the sanctuary. Gothic seems to depict 
the untutored spirit of man, nurtured on nature and 
religion, working out a wild and native grace in in- 
tricacy of tracery and ornament. But the classical 
setting brings with it a sober and settled air, a wider 
and larger range of human interests, a certain antiquity 
of mental culture. 

Pater's own rooms are approached by a staircase in 
the south-east corner of the first court, which leads 
to a little thick-walled panelled parlour, now white, 
then painted a delicate yellow, with black doors ; an 
old-fashioned scroll round the mantelpiece was picked 
out in gold. The deeply recessed oriel window 
looks out upon the Radcliffe. Some trace of Pater's 
dainty ways lingers in the pretty and fantastic iron- 
work of the doors, brought by him from Brittany. 
The room was always furnished with a certain 



18 WALTER PATER [chap. 

seemly austerity and simplicity, never crowded with 
ornament. His only luxury was a bowl of dried rose- 
leaves. He had little desire to possess intrinsically 
valuable objects, and a few engravings served rather to 
remind him of the noble originals than to represent 
them. Thus there exists, now in the possession of 
the Principal of Brasenose, a little tray of copies of 
beautiful Greek coins, bearing large heads with smooth 
and liberal curves, and other dainty devices, on which 
Pater loved to feast his eyes. Mr. Humphry Ward 
writes : — 

" I well remember myfirst visit to his rooms — small, freshly 
painted in greenish white, and hung with three or four line- 
engravings. All dons had line-engravings then, but they 
were all after Raphael. Pater had something more character- 
istic : the ' Three Fates/ attributed to M. Angelo ; a head 
after Correggio ; and I think something of Ingres — a new 
name to Oxford ! The clean, clear table, the stained border 
round the matting and Eastern carpet, and the scanty, bright 
chintz curtains, were a novelty and a contrast to the oaken 
respectability and heaviness of all other dons' rooms at that 
day. The effect was in keeping with his own clear-cut view 
of life, and made, in a small way, ' the colours freshen on 
this threadbare world.' " 

But there was no luxury, no sumptuousness, no 
seductiveness of comfort, about his surroundings. 
That might be left to those who misinterpreted him. 
To the serious student, pleasure and joy must always 
have a certain bracing austerity ; might be sipped, 
perhaps, held up to the light, dwelt upon, but not 
plunged into nor rioted upon. 

Out of the little panelled sitting-room opened a door, 
which led into a narrow passage full of cupboards, and 
admitted the occupant, by a low, ancient, stone-framed 
Gothic doorway, into a tiny slip of a bedroom, only a 



I.] EARLY LIPE 19 

few feet wide. At one end a little window looked out 
into the court; at the other end was an odd projection, 
like a couple of steps, above the floor, forming the roof 
of the small cramped staircase below. Considerations 
of space were so exacting that the head of the bed had 
to rest, without legs, on the projection. The rest of 
the room only just admitted a chest of drawers and 
a simple toilet apparatus. In this miniature room 
Pater slept through the whole of his Oxford days. He 
went to bed early, but in later days was an indifferent 
sleeper, and to beguile the time before he could close 
his eyes, worked slowly through the Dictionary of 
National Biography, volume by volume. He had 
frequent opportunities of changing these rooms for 
a better set ; but partly from economy, and partly from 
the extreme simplicity which characterised him, he pre- 
ferred to stay. It is indeed almost inconceivable that 
a man engaged on literary work requiring such delicate 
concentration, should have lived so contentedly in rooms 
of such narrow resources. The little sitting-room gave 
straight upon the free air of the open passage. On a 
small square table his meals would be spread. His 
outer door was always open ; he was always accessible, 
never seemed to be interrupted by any visitor, was 
never impatient, always courteous and deferential; 
rising from a little round table near the fire, in the 
middle of the most complicated sentence, the most 
elaborate piece of word-construction. 

His habits were marked by the same ascetic sim- 
plicity. He never took afternoon tea, he never smoked. 
His meals were plain to austerity. But he took great 
pains with the little entertainments he gave, ordering 
every item and writing the menu-cards himself. The 
morning, he used to say, was the time for creation, 
the afternoon for correction. He did very little work 



20 WALTER PATER [chap. 

in the evening. His habits were absolutely regular ; 
few days were without their tale of quiet study. He 
concerned himself very little with college matters, 
though he held various college offices ; he was at one 
time Tutor and at the end of his life Dean. He lectured 
to the passmen, and later gave public lectures, of which 
the volume Plato and Platonism was the fruit. One 
of his friends remembers attending these lectures : a 
number of undergraduates arrived, spread out their 
notebooks and prepared to take notes ; but the attempt 
was soon abandoned, the lecturer reading, slowly and 
continuously, in a soft mellow voice, one carefully 
turned phrase after another. Mr. Humphry Ward 
writes : — 

" Then, I suppose about May 1867, came his first lectures. 
Only six or eight Brasenose men were then reading for 
classical Greats ; the system of ' combined ' college lectures, 
to which afterwards Pater owed the large audiences that came 
to hear him on Plato, was not yet invented. We were six 
men, some novices, some dull, all quite unprepared for Pater. 
He sat down and began — it was the ' History of Philosophy.' 
We expected the old formulae about Thales, and some refer- 
ences to Aristotle that we could take down in our books and 
use for the Schools. It was nothing of the kind. It was a 
quickly delivered discourse, rather Comtian, on the Dogmatic 
and Historical methods : quite new to me, and worse than 
new to some others. I remember, as we went out, a senior 

man, F , who used to amaze us by his ready translations of 

Thucydides in ' Mods ' lectures, and who passed as extremely 
clever — as he was in that line — F. threw down his note-book 
with the cry, ' No more of that for me : if Greats mean that, 
I'll cut 'em! ' (as he wisely did)." 

Among Pater's chief friends were, in early days, Pro- 
fessor Ingram By water, his contemporary at Queen's, 
Dr. Edward Caird, now Master of Balliol, Professor 
Nettleship, Mr. W. W. Capes, tutor of Queen's ; but 



i.] EARLY LIFE 21 

his closest friend and lifelong companion -was Mr. 
C. L. Shadwell, then of Christ Church, now Provost of 
Oriel, who had been for a short time his private pupil. 
Pater often travelled in his company, and on Pater's 
death he undertook to act as his literary executor, a 
task which he has fulfilled with a rare loyalty and 
discretion. 

The friends of a somewhat later date were Mark 
Pattison, the Eector of Lincoln; Bishop Creighton, 
then a Fellow of Merton ; the present Provost of 
Worcester, Dr. Daniel, and Mrs. Daniel ; Mr. Humphry 
Ward, a Fellow of Brasenose, and his future wife, 
Miss Mary Arnold ; Mr. Warren, now President of 
Magdalen ; of the larger world, Mr. Swinburne, who 
often visited Oxford, Dr. Appleton, then editor of the 
Academy, Mr. Basil Champneys and Mr. Edmund 
Gosse ; in more recent days Mr. Douglas Ainslie, Mr. 
Arthur Symons, and Mr. Lionel Johnson ; but in later 
years . Pater was perhaps more often cheered and 
encouraged by the devoted companionship of Dr. F. W. 
Bussell, now Vice-Principal of Brasenose, than by any 
other of his friendships. 

But, though one may enumerate his closer friends, 
Pater did not make friends easily, unless he was 
met with a certain simple candour and ready sym- 
pathy; what he valued was a quiet domestic com- 
panionship, in which he could talk easily of what was 
in his mind. To those that were without he showed 
a certain suave and amiable deference ; and even to 
his intimates he was often reserved, baffling, and mys- 
terious, from a deep-seated reticence and reserve. 

When Pater was settled at Brasenose, he took a 
house, No. 2 Bradmore Koad, in Norham Gardens, 
which gave him opportunities for simple hospitality 
and the easy domestic background that he loved. 



22 WALTER PATER [chap. 

He liked to have friends to stay quietly with, him, 
and always manifested an extreme solicitude about 
the comfort of his guests down to the smallest details, 
planning the days that they spent with him so 
that they should be entertained and amused. " Are 
you comfortable ? " was a question, uttered with the 
delicate and deliberate precision of pronunciation, that 
was constantly on his lips. But the entertaining 
of guests tired him, partly because it interfered 
with the simple and leisurely routine of the day, 
and partly because, with his scrupulous considerateness, 
it put a great strain on his sympathy. He could not 
pursue his usual habits and leave his guests to amuse 
themselves ; he was always conscious that they were 
in the house, and felt the responsibility for their 
comfort and amusement very deeply. * 

To give an impression of him in those early days, I 
will quote Mr. Ward's words : — 

" When I entered Brasenose as a freshman-scholar in 
October, 1864, W. H. Pater was junior Fellow. I did not 
make his acquaintance till long afterwards, but from the first 
I was struck with his appearance, his high, rather receding 
forehead ; his bright eyes, placed near together, his face clean- 
shaven except for a short moustache (this was rare in those 
days), his slight stoop, and his quick walk with a curious swing 
of the shoulders. As I got to know senior men, especially 
of other colleges, I gradually became conscious that Pater was 
already vaguely celebrated in the University. He was sup- 
posed to have anew and daring philosophy of his own, and a 
wonderful gift of style, owing his Fellowship to these two, for 
he was no scholar, as the Universities understand the word." 

That Pater was no scholar, in the technical sense of 
the word, is true enough ; but he answered rather to 
Lord Macaulajr's definition of a scholar, as one who 
read Plato with his feet on the fender. He was not 



I.] EARLY LIFE 23 

at any time a great reader or a profound student ; he 
was on the look-out for quality rather than for definite 
facts. He was very fastidious about the style even of 
authors whose matter and treatment he admired. " I 
admire Poe's originality and imagination/ 5 he once said, 
"but I cannot read him in the original. He is so 
rough; I read him in Baudelaire's translation." In- 
deed he read less and less as time went on ; in later 
years, apart from reading undertaken for definite pur- 
poses, he concentrated himself more and more upon 
a few great books, such as Plato and the Bible, which 
he often read in the Vulgate ; he made no attempt at 
any time to keep abreast of the literature of the day. 

Pater regarded his Oxford life primarily as a life of 
quiet literary study; this was his chief object; he had 
a strong natural dislike of responsibility ; he did not 
consider himself a professional educator, though he 
thought it a plain duty to give encouragement and sym- 
pathy in intellectual things to any students who desired 
or needed direction. But he did not conceive that 
there ought to be any question of disciplinary training 
or coercion in the matter ; to those who required help, 
he gave it eagerly, patiently, generously; but he 
never thought of himself as a species of schoolmaster, 
whose business it was to make men work ; on the 
other hand he realised his personal responsibility to 
the full. He was always ready to give advice about 
work, about the choice of a profession, and above all 
laboured to clear away the scruples of men who had 
intended to enter the ministry of the church, and 
found themselves doubtful of their vocation. He had 
a special sympathy for the ecclesiastical life, and was 
anxious to remove any obstacles, to resolve any doubts, 
which young men are so liable to encounter in their 
undergraduate days. 



24 WALTER PATER [chap. 

As Dr. Bussell, in a Memorial Sermon preached in 
Brasenose Chapel after Pater's death, finely said, .we 
may see in Pater 

" a pattern of the student life, an example of the mind 
which feels its own responsibilities, which holds and will 
use the key of knowledge ; severely critical of itself and its 
own performances ; genially tolerant of others ; keenly appre- 
ciating their merit; a modest and indulgent censor; a 
sympathetic adviser." 

His attitude towards younger men was always 
serious and kindly, but he never tried to exert in- 
fluence, or to seek the society of those whose views he 
felt to be antipathetic. That a man should be ardently 
disposed to athletic pursuits was no obstacle to Pater's 
friendship, though he was himself entirely averse to 
games; it rather constituted an additional reason 
for admiring one with whom he felt otherwise in 
sympathy, though it was no passport to his favour. 
He took no part in questions of discipline, which at 
Brasenose are entirely in the hands of a single 
officer ; indeed it is recorded that on the only occasion 
when he was called upon to assist in quelling an 
outbreak of rowdyism, he contrived to turn a hose, 
intended to quench a bonfire, into the window of an 
undergraduate's bedroom, to whom he had afterwards 
to give leave to sleep out of college in consequence of 
the condition of his rooms. 

Besides delivering lectures, it was a chief part of 
Pater's work to look over and criticise the essays of his 
pupils. He spent a great deal of pains on the essays 
submitted to him ; he seldom set subjects, but required 
that a man should choose a subject in which he was 
interested. It is usual for a lecturer to have an essay 
read aloud to him, and to make what criticisms he 



i.] EARLY LIFE 25 

can, as they arise in his mind, without previous pre- 
paration. But Pater had the essays shown up to him, 
scrutinised them carefully, even pencilling comments 
upon the page; and then, in an interview, he gave 
careful verdicts as to style and arrangement, and 
made many effective and practical suggestions. Mr. 
Humphry Ward says, " He was severe on confusions 
of thought, and still more so on any kind of rhetoric. 
An emphatic word or epithet was sure to be under- 
scored, and the absolutely right phrase suggested." 
Pater always followed a precise ritual on these occa- 
sions. He always appeared, whatever he might be 
doing, to be entirely unoccupied; he would vacate 
his only armchair and instal the pupil in it ; and then 
going to the window, he would take his place on the 
window seat and say, " Well, let us see what this is 
all about." 

Though his own literary bent was so clearly defined, 
he never had the least idea of forming a school of 
writers on the model of his own style ; all such direct 
influences were distasteful to him ; he merely aimed 
at giving advice which should result in the attainment 
of the most lucid and individual statement possible. 
He had no sort of desire to be a master or a leader, 
or to direct disciples on any but the old and tradi- 
tional lines. His principle indeed was the Socratic 
ideal — "to encourage young men to take an interest 
in themselves." 

He would sometimes ask a student to join him 
in the vacation,, which must have been a severe tax on 
one so independent and fond of seclusion as Pater, 
when he would coach him and walk with him. At the 
same time, says one of those who came within his 
circle in later days, it was felt that his relations with 
younger men were guided more by a sense of duty than 



26 WALTER PATER [chap. i. 

by instinct. He was like Telemachus, " decent not to 
fail in offices of tenderness." He was careful, says the 
same friend, to write and inquire about one's interests 
and one's progress. But it was clear that he was in a 
way self-centred, that he depended on no one, but lived 
in a world of his own, working out his own thoughts 
with a firm concentration, and that though he was end- 
lessly kind and absolutely faithful, yet that few made 
any vital difference to him. He was a steady friend, 
and always responsive to the charm of youth, of sym- 
pathy, of intellectual interest. But even those who 
were brought into close contact with him were apt 
to feel that far down in his nature lurked a certain 
untamed scepticism, a suspension of mind, that lay 
deeper than his hopes and even than his beliefs. But 
it was impossible to doubt his real tenderness of heart, 
his fellow-feeling, his goodness. 

Mr. Ward, who spent part of a summer vacation at 
this time in Pater's company, writes : — 

" The month at Sidmouth made us rather intimate, and 
afterwards I often walked and lunched with Pater at Oxford. 
He had begun to publish then : the articles on ' Coleridge ' 
and ' Winckelmann' in the Westminster Review had appeared, 
and had made a great sensation in the University. Unfamiliar 
with Goethe at first-hand, and with the French romantics such 
as ThCophile Gautier, the men of about my standing had their 
first revelation of the neo-Cyrenaic philosophy and of the 
theory of Art for Art, in these papers. None the less, even 
those of us who were most attracted by them, and men like 
myself to whom Pater was personally very kind, found intimacy 
with him very difficult. He could be tremendously interesting 
in talk ; his phrases, his point of view, were originaland always 
stimulating ; but you never felt that he was quite at one with 
you in habits, feelings, preferences. His inner world was not 
that of any one else at Oxford." 



CHAPTER II 

EARLY WRITINGS 

I have thought it best in this study of a life 
marked by so few external events, to follow as far as 
possible the chronological order of Pater's writings, 
for this reason ; that though he revealed in conversa- 
tion and social intercourse scarcely anything of the 
workings and the progress of his mind, yet his writings 
constitute a remarkable self-revelation of a character 
of curious intensity and depth, within certain defined 
limits. 

After disentangling himself from metaphysical 
speculations, after what may be called his artistic con- 
version, which dates from his first journey to Italy, 
he threw himself with intense concentration into the 
task of developing his power of expression. Thus 
his first deliberate work is a species of manifesto, an 
enunciation of the principles with which he began his 
artistic pilgrimage. 

The interest of the study " Winckelmann " is very 
great. It has been made the subject of a myth, the 
legend being that it was written while Pater was a boy 
at school. This statement, which is wholly without 
foundation, is only worth mentioning in order that it 
may be contradicted. The origin of the story is pro- 
bably to be found in the desire to make Pater's boy- 
hood prophetic of his later interests; but the study 

27 



28 WALTER PATER [chap. 

was as a matter of fact written in 1866. It appeared 
in January 1867, in the Westminster Review. 

There is a charm about the early work of writers 
whose style is strongly individual. Sometimes these 
early attempts are tentative and unequal, as if the 
writer had not yet settled down to a deliberate style ; 
they bear traces of the effect of other favourite styles. 
The curtain seems to rise, so to speak, jerkily, and to 
reveal the performer by glimpses ; but in the case of 
the " Winckelmann " the curtain goes up tranquilly 
and evenly, and the real Pater steps quietly upon 
the stage. 

The style in which " Winckelmann " is written is a 
formed style ; it contains all the characteristics which 
give Pater his unique distinction. It is closely and 
elaborately packed; the sentences have the long 
stately cadences; the epithets have the soigneux 
flavour ; and it is full, too, of those delicate and sug- 
gestive passages, where a beautiful image is hinted, 
with a severe economy of art, rather than worked oat in 
the Ruskinian fashion. There is, too, a rigid suppres- 
sion of the ornamental ; it is like gold from which the 
encompassing gravel has been washed. But it has also 
a passion, a glow, which is somewhat in contrast to a 
certain sense of weariness that creeps into some of the 
later work. It is youthful, ardent, indiscreet. But 
for all that it is accurately proportioned and mature. 
It shows the power, which is very characteristic of 
Pater, of condensing an exact knowledge of detail into 
a few paragraphs, retaining what is salient and illumi- 
nating, and giving the effect of careful selection. 

It is plain, in the " Winckelmann," that the writer 
had been hitherto occupied in somewhat experimental 
researches ; but here he seems to have found his own 
point of view in a moment, and to have suddenly appre- 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 29 

hended his attitude to the world. It is as when a 
carrier-pigeon released from its prison beats round 
and round, determining by some mysterious instinct 
the direction of its home ; and at last sweeps off, 
without doubt or hesitation, with steady strokes on the 
chosen path. 

Winckelmann was one who, after a dark and poverty- 
stricken youth, of mental and indeed physical starva- 
tion, became aware of the perfect beauty of Greek art, 
and renounced all study but that of the literature of the 
arts, till he became " consummate, tranquil, withdrawn 
into the region of ideals, yet retaining colour from the 
incidents of a passionate intellectual life." He re- 
nounced his metaphysical and legal studies, in which 
he had made progress. He joined the Church of Rome, 
to gain the patronage of the Saxon Court ; and finally 
transferred himself to Eome, where, he wrote his 
History of Ancient Art. He lived a life of severe 
simplicity, absorbed entirely in intellectual and artistic 
study, his only connection with the world in which he 
lived being a series of romantic and almost passionate 
friendships. His end was tragic ; for he was murdered 
by a fellow-traveller at Trieste for the sake of some 
gold medals which he had received at Vienna. Goethe, 
whose intellectual ideal had been deeply affected by 
Winckelmann's writings, was awaiting his arrival at 
Leipsic with intense enthusiasm, but was not destined 
ever to see him. 

Such was the figure that appealed so strongly to 
Pater's mind ; and perhaps the chief interest of the 
essay is the strong autobiographical element that 
appears in it. Pater saw in Winckelmann a type of 
himself, of his own intellectual struggles, of his own 
conversion to the influence- of art. After a con- 
fused and blinded youth, self-contained and meagrely 



30 WALTER PATER [chap. 

nourished, Winekelmann had struck out, without 
hesitation or uneasy lingering, on his path among the 
stars. It is impossible not to feel in many passages 
that Pater is reading his own soul-history into that 
of his hero. 

" It is easy," he writes, " to indulge the commonplace meta- 
physical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one 
of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould 
our lives to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, 
not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental know- 
ledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect 
the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life." 

And again : — 

" Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its conflicting 
claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, 
so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the 
problem of unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is 
far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms 
of antique life. . . . The pure instinct of self -culture cares not 
so much to reap all that these forms of culture can give, as to 
find in them its own strength. The demand of the intellect 
is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the operation, 
the intellectual reward of every divided form of culture ; 
but only that it may measure the relation between itself and 
them. It struggles with those forms till its secret is won from 
each, and then lets eachf all back into its place, in the supreme, 
artistic view of life. With a kind of passionate coldness, such 
natures rejoice to be away from and past their former selves." 

And once again : — 

" On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How 
facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and 
the understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, 
surely, is the more liberal life we have been seeking so long, 
so near to us all the while. How mistaken and roundabout 
have been our efforts to reach it by mystic passion, and 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 31 

monastic reverie ; how they have deflowered the flesh ; how 
little they have emancipated us ! " 

An eager intensity of feeling thrills through these 
impassioned sentences. One feels instinctively that 
the writer of these words, after years of blind and 
mute movements, like the worm in the cocoon, had 
suddenly broken free, and had seen his creased and 
folded wings expand and glitter in the sun. Art, 
friendship, perception, emotion, that was the true 
life he had been desiring so long ; and yet, after all, 
what an inner life it was to be ! There was no impulse 
to fling himself into the current of the world, to taste 
the life of cities, where the social eddy spun swift 
and strong ; he was to be austere, self-centred, silent 
still. Only in seclusion was he to utter his im- 
passioned dreams in a congenial ear. " Blitheness and 
repose ! " these were to be the keynotes of the new 
life; a clear-sighted mastery of intellectual problems, 
a joyful perception of the beauties of art, a critical 
attitude, that was to be able to distinguish by practised 
insight what was perfect and permanent from what 
was merely bold and temporary. And so, light of 
heart, his imagination revelling at the thought of all 
the realms of beauty it was to traverse, undimmed 
and radiant, the dumb and darkened past providing 
the contrast needed to bring out the brightness and 
the hope of what lay before, Pater set out upon his 
pilgrimage. And yet there is a shadow. As he writes 
in one of the most pathetic sentences, in one of his 
later and most tender sketches, of just such another 
pilgrimage, " Could he have foreseen the weariness of 
the way ! " 

The years began to pass slowly and quietly. Pater 
performed his tale of prescribed work, and gave him- 
self over to leisurely study and meditation. He was 



32 WALTER PATER [chap. 

not averse to social pleasures in these days, and began 
to make congenial acquaintances, among whom he gained 
a reputation as a brilliant and paradoxical talker. He 
fed his sense of beauty by frequent visits to Italy, 
though he never gained more than a superficial acquaint- 
ance either with Italian art or modern Italian life. 
He was in this matter always an eclectic, following his 
own preferences and guided by his prejudices. He had 
little catholicity of view, and seldom studied the work 
of artists with whom he did not feel himself at once in 
sympathy. His travels were rather a diligent storing 
of beautiful impressions. He wrote to Mr. Edmund 
Gosse in 1877, of a visit to Azay-le-Kideau : — 

"We find always great pleasure in adding to our experi- 
ences of these French places, and return always a little tired, 
indeed, but with our minds pleasantly full of memories of 
stained glass, old tapestries and new flowers." 

Pater certainly showed no undue haste to garner the 
harvest of the brain in these years. He was studying, 
enjoying, meditating. He wrote at the rate of a short 
essay or two a year. The essay of 1868 on " Aesthetic 
Poetry " was suppressed for twenty-one years. In 1869 
he wrote the " Notes on Leonardo da Vinci," one of the 
most elaborate and characteristic of his writings. In 

1870 it was " A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli." In 

1871 it was " Pico della Mirandola," and the " Poetry 
of Michelangelo." All these appeared in the Fort- 
nightly Review. And then in 1873 he produced his first 
book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, in which 
he included, together with those studies which had pre- 
viously been published, a Preface and a " Conclusion," 
both of which are of deep significance in studying the 
course of Pater's mental development, and three other 
essays : " Aucassin and Nicolette " (in later editions 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 33 

named " Two Early French Stories "), " Lnca della 
Robbia," and " Joachim du Bellay." To these, in the 
third edition of the Studies (1888), was added " The 
School of Giorgione," which had appeared in the Fort- 
nightly Review for October, 1877 ; while in the second 
edition of the book, which came out in the same year 
(1877), the " Conclusion " was omitted, but re-appeared 
with slight modifications in the third edition. 

The essay on " Aesthetic Poetry " eventually ap- 
peared, as we have said, in 1889 in Appreciations, but 
it was again omitted in the second edition of that 
volume (1890), and does not appear in the complete 
issue of his works. 

I do not know what it was that made Pater with- 
draw the essay on "Aesthetic Poetry," written in 1868, 
from the later issue of Appreciations. Probably some 
unfavourable or wounding criticism, expressing a belief 
that he was closer to these exotic fancies then he knew 
himself to be. It is a strange and somewhat dreamy 
composition, rather a mystical meditation upon a 
phase of thought than a disentangling of precise 
principles. He takes William Morris's Defence of 
Guerievere as a text, saying that " the poem which gives 
its name to the volume is a thing tormented and awry 
with passion . . . and the accent falls in strange, un- 
wonted places with the effect of a great cry." He says 
that the secret of the enjoyment of this new poetry, 
with the artificial, earthly paradise that it creates, is 
" that inversion of home-sickness known to some, that 
incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual 
form of life satisfies, no poetry even, if it be merely 
simple and spontaneous." He compares the movement 
with the development of mystical religious literature, 
and defines the dangerous emotionalism of the monastic 
form of life, when adopted by persons of strongly sen- 



34 WALTER PATER [chap. 

suous temperament, saying that such natures learn 
from religion "the art of directing towards an un- 
seen object sentiments whose natural direction is to- 
wards objects of sense." "Here, under this strange 
complex of conditions, as in some medicated air, exotic 
flowers of sentiment expand, among people of a remote 
and unaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, andro- 
gynous, the light almost shining through them." 

One cannot help feeling that the above sentence 
may be the very passage, from the air of strange 
passion which stirs in it, for which the essay was 
condemned. Or again the following sentence: "He 
(Morris) has diffused through ' King Arthur's Tomb ' 
the maddening white glare of the sun, and tyranny of 
the moon, not tender and far-off, but close down — the 
sorcerer's moon, large and feverish. The colouring is 
intricate and delirious, as of ' scarlet lilies.' The 
influence of summer is like a poison in one's blood, 
with a sudden bewildered sickening of life and all 
things." There is indeed a certain disorder of the 
sense in this passage, the hint of a dangerous mood 
which seems to grasp after strange delights and evil 
secrets, in a reckless and haunted twilight. It is a 
veritable fleur die mal ; and Pater, with his strong 
instinct for restraint and austerity of expression, pro- 
bably felt that he was thus setting a perilous example 
of over-sensuous imagery, and an exotic lusciousness 
of thought. 

He goes on to say that in this poetry, life seems to 
break from conventional things, and to realise experi- 
ence, pleasure, and pain alike, as new and startling 
things for which no poetry, no tradition, no usage had 
prepared it. " Everywhere there is an impression of 
surprise, as of people first waking from the golden age, 
at fire, snow, wine, the touch of water as one swims, 



II.] 



EARLY WRITINGS 35 



the salt taste of the sea. And this simplicity at first 
hand is a strange contrast to the sought-out simplicity 
of Wordsworth. Desire here is towards the body of 
nature for its own sake, not because a soul is divined 
through it." He shows that even Morris's classical 
poems, such as Jason and the Earthly Paradise, are 
filled and saturated with the medieval spirit; for 
it will be remembered that though the setting of 
the Earthly Paradise is primarily medieval, yet the 
point of the poem is that we are supposed to be 
brought into contact with "a reserved fragment of 
Greece, which by some divine good fortune lingers on 
in the western sea into the Middle Age." The pagan 
element, he points out, is " the continual suggestion, 
pensive or passionate, of the shortness of life," con- 
trasting with the natural unspoiled joy in the beauty of 
the world. 

Early as the essay is, in the date of its composition, 
one feels that Pater, by omitting it from later editions, 
was deliberately retracing his steps, conscious that he 
had turned aside, in writing it, into a bypath of the 
spirit, and away from the more sober and serious ideal 
of his life. Its strange beauty is undeniable; but in 
its omission we see, as it were, a warning hand held 
up, indicating that not in this luxurious gloom, this 
enervating atmosphere, are the true ends of the spirit 
to be attained. 

The Studies in the History of the Renaissance deserve 
close attention, in the first place for themselves, because 
of the elaborateness of the art displayed, the critical 
subtlety with which typical qualities are seized and in- 
terpreted. As the bee ranges over flowers at will, and 
gathers a tiny draught of honey from each, which, 
though appropriated, secreted, and reproduced, still 
bears the flavor of the particular flower, whether of the 



36 WALTER PATER [chap. 

garden violet or the wild heather-bell, from which it 
was drawn, so these essays exhibit each a characteristic 
savour of the art or the figure which furnished them. 
They are no shallow or facile impressions, but bear the 
marks of resolute compression and fine selection. But 
they are not mere forms reflected in the mirror of a per- 
ceptive mind. They are in the truest sense symbolical, 
charged to the brim with the personality of the writer, 
and thus to be ranged with creative rather than critical 
art. Those who cannot see with Pater's eyes may 
look in vain, in the writings or the pictures of which he 
speaks, for the mysterious suggestiveness of line and 
colour which he discerns in them. They have suffered in 
passing through the medium of his perception, like the 
bones of the drowned king, "a sea-change into some- 
thing rich and strange " ; they are like the face which 
he describes, into which the soul with all its maladies 
had passed. It is hardly for us to estimate the ethical 
significance of the attitude revealed. It must suffice 
to say that in the hands of Pater these pictures out of 
the past have been transmuted by a secret and deep 
current of emotion into something behind and beyond 
the outer form. They are charged with dreams. 

And in the second place they reveal, perhaps, the 
sincerest emotions of a mind at its freshest and 
strongest. No considerations of prudence or dis- 
cretion influenced his thought. Few writers perhaps 
preserve, through fame and misunderstanding alike, so 
consistent, so individual an attitude as Pater. But it 
must also be borne in mind that he was deeply sensi- 
tive, and though he was deliberately and instinctively 
sincere in all his work, yet in his later writings 
one feels that criticism and even misrepresentation 
had an effect upon him. He realised that there were 
certain veins of thought that were not convenient; 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 37 

that the frank enunciation of principles evoked im- 
patience and even suspicion in the sturdy and breezy 
English mind. He held on his way indeed, though with 
a certain sadness. But there is no touch of that outer 
sadness in these first delicate and fanciful creations ; 
the sadness that breathes through them is the inner 
sadness, the veiled melancholy that makes her sovereign 
shrine in the very temple of delight. Here, too, may 
be seen the impassioned joy that is born of the shock 
of exquisite impressions coming home to a nature that 
is widening and deepening every hour. 

The preface of the book strikes a firm note of 
personality. Pater is here seen to be in strong revolt 
against the synthetic school of art-criticism. The 
business of the aesthetic critic, he declares with 
solemn earnestness, is not to attempt a definition 
of abstract beauty, but to realise the relativity of 
beauty, and to discern the quality, the virtue, of the 
best art of a writer or an artist. He explains too his 
principle of selection, namely that while the interest 
of the Eenaissance is centred in Italy, its outer ripples, 
so to speak, must be studied in French poetry as 
well as in the later German manifestations of the same 
spirit. 

There is an interesting passage, in the recent memoir 
of Lady Dilke, about Pater's Renaissance. It will be 
remembered that when the book appeared she was the 
wife of Mark Pattison. She was then much engaged 
in the practice of art-criticism, and reviewed the book 
with some severity, as lacking in scientific exactness 
and in historical perspective. She thought that Pater 
had isolated the movement from its natural origins, 
and complained that he had treated the Eenaissance as 
" an air-plant, independent of the ordinary sources of 
nourishment ... a sentimental revolution having no 



38 WALTER PATER [chap. 

relation to the actual conditions of the world." This 
criticism has a certain truth in it, and gains interest 
from the fact that it probably to a certain extent 
represents the mature judgment of Pattison himself. 
But it is based on a misconception of the scope of the 
book, and is sufficiently rebutted by the modest title 
of the volume, Studies in the History of the Eenaissance. 
The book, indeed, lays no claim to be an exhaustive 
treatment of the movement. It is only a poetical and 
suggestive interpretation of certain brilliant episodes, 
springing from deeper causes which Pater made no 
attempt to indicate. 

In the first essay, " Aucassin and Nicolette," he 
points out that the sweetness of the Eenaissance is 
not only derived from the classical world, but from 
the native outpouring of the spirit which showed itself 
in ecclesiastical art and in native French poetry, and 
which prompted and prepared the way for the en- 
thusiastic return to classical art. 

In " Pico della Mirandola" he traces the attempt to 
reconcile the principles of Christianity with the re- 
ligion of ancient Greece, not by any historical or philo- 
sophical method, but by allegorical interpretation, in 
the spirit of that " generous belief that nothing which 
had ever interested the human mind could wholly lose 
its vitality." He dwells with wistful delight upon the 
figure of this graceful and precocious scholar, Pico, 
" Earl of Mirandola, and a great Lord of Italy " — Pico, 
nurtured in the law, but restless and athirst, with the 
eager and uncritical zest of the time, for philosophy, 
for language, for religion, working, fitfully and bril- 
liantly, in the hope that some solution would be found 
to satisfy the yearnings of the soul, some marvellous 
secret, which would in a moment gratify and harmonise 
all curious and warring impulses. Pico, beloved of 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 39 

women, seemly and gracious of mien, dying of fever 
at so early an age, and lying down for his last rest in 
the grave habit of the Dominicans, mystical, ardent, 
weary with the weariness that comes of so swift and 
perilous a pilgrimage, is a type of beauty shadowed by 
doom, mortality undimmed by age or disease, that 
appealed with passionate force to Pater's mind. 

In the essay on " Sandro Botticelli " he touches on 
the meditative subtlety, the visionary melancholy of 
the painter, "the peculiar sentiment with which he 
infuses his profane and sacred persons, comely, and in 
a certain sense like angels, but with a sense of dis- 
placement or loss about them — the wistfulness of 
exiles, conscious of a passion and energy greater than 
any known issue of them explains, which runs through 
all his varied work with a sentiment of ineffable melan- 
choly." He traces the strange mixture of idealism 
and realism which transfuses Botticelli's pictures, his 
men and women, " clothed sometimes by passion with 
a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened 
perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great 
things from which they shrink. His morality is all 
sympathy." He confesses frankly that Botticelli dis- 
plays an incomplete grasp of the resources of art ; but 
he indicates with subtle perception the haunted and 
wistful spirit of the artist. 

In the " Luca della Robbia " Pater traces very skil- 
fully the attempt made to unite the pleasure derivable 
from sculpture with the homely art of pottery, the 
old-world modesty and seriousness and simplicity 
which put out its strength to adorn and cultivate 
daily household life ; and he shows, too, the exquisite 
intimiti and the originality of the man, which is so 
rarely exhibited in the white abstract art of sculpture. 

The motif of the " Poetry of Michelangelo " is best 



40 WALTER PATER [chap. 

summed up in the words which Pater uses as a re- 
current phrase : ex forti dulcedo — out of the strong 
came forth sweetness. He says : — 

" The interest of Michelangelo's poems is that they make 
us spectators of this struggle ; the struggle of a strong nature 
to adorn and attune itself; the struggle of a desolating 
passion, which yearns to be resigned and sweet and pensive, 
as Dante's was." 

The essay beautifully contrasts the extremes of that 
volcanic nature, the man who, as Raphael said, walked 
the streets of Rome like an executioner, and who yet, 
at the other end of the scale, could conceive and bring 
to perfection the exquisite sweetness, the almost over- 
composed dignity, of the great Pieta. The essay 
abounds in subtle and delicate characterisation of the 
manifestations of that desirous, rugged, uncomforted 
nature. Thus, in speaking of the four symbolical fig- 
ures, Night, Day, The Twilight, The Daiun, which adorn 
the sacristy of San Lorenzo, Pater says that the names 
assigned them are far too precise. — 

" They concentrate and express, less by way of definite 
conceptions than by the touches, the promptings of a piece 
of music, all those vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments, 
which shift and mix and define themselves and fade again, 
whenever the thoughts try to fix themselves with sincerity on 
the conditions and surroundings of the disembodied spirit. I 
suppose no one would come to the sacristy of San Lorenzo for 
consolation ; for seriousness, for solemnity, for dignity of im- 
pression, perhaps, but not for consolation. It is a place neither 
of terrible nor consoling thoughts, but of vague and wistful 
speculation." 

Perhaps it may be said that in this essay Pater re- 
veals an over-subtlety of conception in his desire to 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 41 

substantiate the contrast. There was an essential unity 
of character, of aim, about Michelangelo ; and the con- 
trasts are merely the same intensity of mood working 
in different regions, not a difference of mood. The 
chief value of the essay lies in its lyrical fervour, in 
the poetical and suggestive things that are said by the 
way. 

The essay on " Leonardo da Vinci " is certainly the 
most brilliant of all the essays, and contains elaborate 
passages which, for meditative sublimity and exquisite 
phrasing, Pater never surpassed. The fitful, mysteri- 
ous, beauty-haunted nature of Leonardo, the stream of 
his life broken into such various channels, his absorp- 
tion, his remoteness, passing "unmoved through the 
most tragic events, overwhelming his country and 
friends, like one who comes across them by chance on 
some secret errand " — all this had a potent attraction 
for Pater. The essay is a wonderful piece of construc- 
tive skill, interweaving as it does all the salient 
features of the "legend" of Vasari with a perfect illus- 
trative felicity. But it is in the descriptive passages 
that Pater touches the extreme of skill, as for instance 
in his description of the sea-shore of the Saint Anne, 
" that delicate place, where the wind passes like the 
hand of some fine etcher over the surface, and the un- 
torn shells are lying thick upon the sand, and the tops 
of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green 
with grass, grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not 
of dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, 
and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of 
finesse. Through Leonardo's strange veil of sight 
things reach him so ; in no ordinary night or day, but 
as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief interval of 
falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water." 

Though the celebrated passage which describes " La 



42 WALTER PATER [chap. 

Gioconda " has been abundantly quoted, it may here 
be given in full : — 

" The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, 
is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men 
had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all < the 
ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. 
It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the 
deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic 
reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside 
one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of 
antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, 
into which the soul with all its maladies has passed ! All 
the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and 
moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and 
make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, 
the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its 
spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the 
Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the 
rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been 
dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave ; and 
has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day 
about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern 
merchants : and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, 
and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary ; and all this has been 
to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in 
the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing linea- 
ments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands." 

Such writing as this has an undeniable magic 
about it ; though its vagueness is not wholly character- 
istic of Pater's ordinary manner, it is a wonderful 
achievement; it is more like a musical fantasia, 
embodying hints and echoes, touching with life a store 
of reveries and dreams, opening up strange avenues of 
dreamful thought, than a precise description of any 
actual work of art. To say that Leonardo himself 
would have disclaimed this interpretation of his picture 
is not to dispel the beauty of the criticism; for the 



ii.] EAKLY WRITINGS 43 

magical power of art is its quickening spirit, its faculty 
of touching trains of thought that run far beyond the 
visible and bounding horizon. It is possible, too, to dis- 
like the passage for its strong and luscious fragrance, 
its overpowering sensuousness, to say that it is touched 
with decadence, in its dwelling on the beauty of evil, 
made fair by remoteness ; but this is to take an ethical 
view of it, to foresee contingencies, to apprehend the 
ultimate force of its appeal. As in all lofty art, the 
beauty is inexplicable, the charm incommunicable ; its 
sincerity, its zest is apparent; and it can hardly be 
excelled as a typical instance of the prose that is 
essentially poetical, in its liquid cadences, its echoing 
rhythms. In any case, whether one feels the charm 
of the passage or not, it must remain as perhaps the 
best instance of Pater's early mastery of his art, in its 
most elaborate and finished form. 

The essay on the " School of Giorgione " is a later 
work (1877), but it will be well to consider it here. It 
is an elaborate composition, and shows a tendency to 
return to metaphysical speculation, or rather to inter- 
fuse a metaphysical tinge into artistic perception. He 
lays down the principle that the quality of the parti- 
cular medium of a work of art is what it is necessary 
to discern, and that it is a mistake to blend the appeal 
of different methods of artistic expression. " All art," 
he says in an italicised sentence, showing that he is 
laying it down as an established maxim, "constantly 
aspires towards the condition of music" because music is 
the only art which makes its appeal through pure form, 
while all other art tends to have the motive con- 
fused by the matter, by the subject which it aims at 
reproducing. " Music, then, and not poetry, as is so 
often supposed," he adds, " is the true type or measure 
of perfected art." 



44 WALTER PATER [chap. 

The attitude of Giorgione, his distinctive quality, lies, 
according to Pater, in the fact that " he is the inventor 
of genre, of those easily movable pictures which serve 
neither for uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or his- 
toric teaching — little groups of real men and women, 
amid congruous furniture or landscape — morsels of 
actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon 
or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life 
from afar." But one of the chief points of interest in 
the essay is that Pater devotes more space to his per- 
ception of music than he does in any other place. Gior- 
gione himself was, according to traditions, an admirable 
musician, and musical scenes are made the motive of 
many of his pictures, or of those attributed to him : 
"music heard at the pool-side while people fish, or 
mingled with the sound of the pitcher in the well, or 
heard across runniDg water, or among the flocks ; the 
tuning of instruments — people with intent faces, as if 
listening, like those described by Plato in an ingenious 
passage, to detect the smallest interval of musical 
sound, the smallest undulation in the air, or feeling for 
music in thought on a stringless instrument, ear and 
finger refining themselves infinitely, in the appetite 
for sweet sound — a momentary touch of an instrument 
in the twilight, as one passes through some unfamiliar 
room, in a chance company." 

But the essay is not perhaps quite as lucid as some 
of the earlier work ; the tendency to construct long 
involved sentences, full of parentheses, is here ap- 
parent ; it gives one the impression of a vague musi- 
cal modulation, which, beautiful in its changes, its 
relations, lacks the crispness and certainty of precise 
form. 

There remains the " Joachim du Bellay," a slight 
essay where Pater occupies himself with showing how 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 45 

Ronsard endeavoured to draw the influence of the 
Italian renaissance in to enliven and deepen the native 
Gothic material of French song, "gilding its surface 
with a strange delightful foreign aspect, like a chance 
effect of light." He indicates how, in that transforma- 
tion, the old French seriousness disappeared, leaving 
nothing but " the elegance, the aerial touch, the perfect 
manner" in the poets of Eonsard's school, of whom Du 
Bellay was the last. Du Bellay strove with all his 
might, as in the little tract, La Defense et Illustration de 
la Langue Francoyse, " to adjust the existing French 
culture to the rediscovered classical culture," " to en- 
noble the French language, to give it grace, number, 
perfection." Pater traces the eagerness for word-music, 
the beginnings of poesie intime, the poetry in which a 
writer strives to shape his innermost moods or to take 
the world into his confidence. He illustrates Du 
Bellay's fondness for landscape : " a sudden light trans- 
figures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a 
winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door : a moment 
— and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect ; 
but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the 
accident may happen again." 

The whole essay is in a lighter, a less serious tone, 
and dwells more softly upon the surface of things ; and 
thus gives a kind of relief, a breathing space in the 
intense mood. One feels that some art went to the 
careful placing of these essays ; for we pass to the study 
on " Winckelmann," of which we have spoken at length, 
in which Pater found a type by which he might reveal 
his own inner thought, the conversion which he had 
experienced. And thus we come to the " Conclusion," a 
most elaborate texture of writing, made obscure by its 
compression, by its effort to catch and render the most 
complicated effects of thought. This " Conclusion" was 



46 WALTER PATER [chap. 

omitted in the second edition of the book. Pater says 
that he excluded it, " as I conceived it might possibly 
mislead some of those young men into whose hands it 
might fall." He adds that he made a few changes 
which brought it closer to his original meaning, and 
that he had dealt more fully with the subject in Marius 
the Epicurean. 

The only substantial alterations in the essay are as 
follows. Pater originally wrote : — 

"High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ec- 
stasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, 
or the ' enthusiasm of humanity.' " 

This sentence became : — 

" Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, 
ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic 
activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to 
many of us." 

Again, in a passage dealing with the various ways of 
using life, so as to fill it full of beautiful energy, he 
says that " the wisest " spend it "in art and song." In 
the later version he qualifies the words "the wisest" 
by the addition of the phrase "at least among 'the 
children of this world.' " 

The alterations do not appear at first sight to have 
any very great significance ; but Pater says that they 
brought out his original meaning more clearly ; and the 
very minuteness of the changes serves at least to show 
his sense of the momentousness of phrases. 

He traces, in a passage of rich and subtle com- 
plexity, the bewildering effect upon the mind of the 
flood of external impressions ; and compares it with 
the thought that gradually emerges, as the spirit deals 
with these impressions, of the loneliness, the solitude 
of personality j and with the mystery of the movement 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 47 

of time, the flight of the actual moment which is gone 
even while we try to apprehend it. He compares the 
perception to " a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming 
itself on the stream" of sense; and goes on to indicate 
that the aim of the perceptive mind should be to make 
the most of these fleeting moments, to "be present 
always at the focus where the greatest number of vital 
forces unite in their purest energy." " To burn always 
with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this 
ecstasy, is success in life." "Not to discriminate 
every moment some passionate attitude in those about 
us, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep 
before evening." 

He goes on to say that to get as many pulsations 
into the brief interval of life, is the one chance which 
is open to a man; and art, he says, gives most of these, 
"for art comes to you professing frankly to give 
nothing but the highest quality to your moments as 
they pass, and simply for those moments' sake." 

The " Conclusion," then, is a presentment of the purest 
and highest Epicureanism, the Epicureanism that is a 
kind of creed, and realises the duty and necessity of 
activity and energy, but in a world of thought rather 
than of action. The peril of such a creed, of which 
Pater became aware, is that it is in the first place 
purely self-regarding, and in the second place that, 
stated in the form of abstract principles, it affords no 
bulwark against the temptation to sink from a pure 
and passionate beauty of perception into a grosser in- 
dulgence in sensuous delights. The difficulty in the 
artistic, as in the ethical scale, is to discern at what 
point the spirit begins to yield to the lower impulse ; 
when it deserts the asceticism, the purity, the stain- 
lessness of nature which alone can communicate that 
lucidity of vision, that seriousness of purpose, that 



48 WALTER PATER [chap. 

ordered simplicity of life that is to be the character- 
istic of the nobler Epicureanism. 

Not that Pater withdrew the " Conclusion," because 
he mistrusted his own principles ; such principles as he 
held would tend to the refinement and enlargement of 
the moral nature, by multiplying relationships, by 
substituting sympathy for conscience, by admitting to 
the full the loftier religious influences ; and thus the 
self-absorption of the artist would insensibly give place 
to a wider, more altruistic absorption. 

But Pater felt, no, doubt, that having struck a sen- 
suous note in his essays, this statement of principles of 
artistic axioms lent itself to misrepresentation; and 
nothing could more clearly prove the affectionate con- 
siderateness of his nature, his desire for sympathy and 
relationship, his tender care for those whom he loved 
in spirit, than his fear of giving a wrong bias to their 
outlook. And thus the omission has a biographical 
interest, as showing the first shadow of disapproval 
falling on the sensitive mind, that disapproval which 
sometimes hung like a cloud over Pater's enjoyment of 
the world, though it never for a moment diverted him 
from his serious and sustained purpose, as a prophet 
of mysteries. 

Pater's art criticism was distinctly of a literary and 
traditional type. He made little attempt to trace or 
weigh the extrinsic value of works of art, or to discuss 
the subject from the archaeological or the technical 
point of view. He accepted the traditional knowledge 
of the period, made no artistic discoveries, settled no 
controverted points. His concern was entirely with 
the artistic merits of a picture and its poetical 
suggestiveness ; his criticism, indeed, was of the type 
which he defined in a review which he wrote many 
years afterwards for the Guardian as "imaginative 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 49 

criticism" — "that criticism which is itself a kind of 
construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through the 
given literary or artistic product, into the mental and 
inner constitution of the producer, shaping his work;" 
and thus the errors which he made, of which we may 
quote one or two examples, do not really affect the 
value of his criticism very greatly. 

To take his criticism of Leonardo. He was certainly 
wrong, for instance, in his judgment of the Medusa 
picture. This is a picture which shows strong traces 
both of classical and realistic influences. The head 
is classical, the serpents are realistic. It is almost 
certainly at least a century later than Leonardo's 
period. 

Again, the little head with the aureole of hair, -which 
Pater had engraved for a frontispiece to the Renaissance 
as a genuine work of Leonardo's, is simply a school 
drawing, done under the influence, perhaps under the 
supervision, of Leonardo, by a pupil, but certainly not 
the work of the master's hand. 

He makes, too, the general mistake of treating 
Leonardo as a realist. But there is no basis of truth 
in this. The influence of realism had not begun to be 
felt at his date, or at all events in his work. The 
studies, for instance, to which Pater alludes, as of 
various flowers, of which there are a number of in- 
stances in the Windsor collection, are not realistically 
treated, but conventionally, and with the influence of 
tradition strongly marked in them. 

Again it will be remembered how Pater speaks of 
the angel's head, which according to tradition Leonardo 
contributed to a picture of his master, Verrocchio. He 
says that the head is still to be seen, " a space of sun- 
light in the cold, laboured, old picture." There are in 
reality two heads in the picture, probably both by 



50 WALTER PATER [chap. 

Leonardo, and one curiously ill-drawn. But the picture 
is not cold and laboured ; it is simply unfinished, and 
not in a condition on which a judgment of its possi- 
bilities could be passed. 

In the essay on "Botticelli" he was on firmer ground. 
But the essay on the " School of Giorgione " is per- 
haps the most typical instance. There are only two 
Giorgiones which can be positively identified as his 
from contemporary records. These are the picture 
known as "The Three Philosophers," or " The Chaldean 
Sages," which is now supposed by some critics to re- 
present the arrival of Aeneas in Italy ; and the picture 
known as " The Stormy Landscape " in the Giovanelli 
Palace at Venice, which is now sometimes called 
" Adrastus and Hypsipyle." Then there is the great 
Castelf ranco altar-piece, which by tradition and internal 
evidence may be held to be an indubitable Giorgione. 
Then there are others with a reasonable degree of pro- 
bability, such as the " Knight in Armour " in the 
National Gallery, said to be a study for the figure of 
S. Liberale in the Castelfranco altar-piece, an " Adora- 
tion of the Shepherds," belonging to Mr. Wentworth 
Beaumont, and two panels at Florence, one represent- 
ing an incident in the legendary childhood of Moses, 
and the other " The Judgment of Solomon." But 
" The Concert," in the Pitti, cannot be certainly 
attributed to Giorgione, and it may be said that the 
more Pater had known about Giorgione, the less 
likely would he have been to have attributed the 
picture to him. The truth is that Giorgione is a 
somewhat legendary painter, and what work of his is 
authentic is probably his later work. Art critics have 
of course as far as possible to account for the existence 
of such a legend ; but the result is that in Pater's 
hands, with the faulty and imperfect knowledge that 



II.] EAKLY WRITINGS 51 

existed about Giorgione at the time when he wrote, 
the subject is misconceived and exaggerated. There 
is, in the authentic works of Giorgione, an almost entire 
want of dramatic unity. In " The Stormy Landscape," 
for instance, the figures of the mother with an infant 
and the young knight have no connection with each 
other, and are both entirely out of keeping with and 
unaffected by the scene, where the storm is breaking 
in thunder and rain. So, too, in " The Judgment of 
Solomon" panel there is no concentration of motive; 
each figure is conceived separately, and there is no 
sort of attempt at dramatic combination. 

But when all this has been said, it really affects very 
little the value of Pater's work. After all, the pictures 
which he described exist ; the message which they held 
for his own spirit was generated by the sight of them, 
and the poetical suggestiveness of his criticism is full 
of vital force ; he made no attempt to set misconcep- 
tion right, to date pictures, or to alter their dates. He 
took them on trust ; and thus, though his judgments 
have no precise technical value, the inspiration of his 
sympathetic emotion forfeits little or none of its force 
by being expended on pictures which he did not attri- 
bute correctly, and which it could not be expected that 
he should have so attributed. 

The publication of the Renaissance was to be attended 
by important results. It gave Pater a definite place in 
the literary and artistic world. But it had a still 
deeper effect. The spirit of artistic revolt was in the 
air. The writings of Ruskin, the work of the Pre- 
Paphaelites may be taken as two salient instances in 
very different regions of the rising tendency. AY hat 
underlay the whole movement was a desire to treat art 
seriously, and to give it its place in the economy of 
human influences. Side by side with this was a strong 



52 WALTER PATER [chap. 

vein of discontent with established theories of religion, 
of education, of mental cultivation. The younger 
generation was thrilled with a sense of high artistic 
possibilities; it realised that there was a hidden 
treasure of accumulated art, ancient and medieval, 
which remained as a living monument of certain bril- 
liant and glowing forces that seemed to have become 
quiescent. It became aware that it was existing under 
cramped conditions, in a comfortable barbarism, en- 
compassed by strict and respectable traditions, living 
a bourgeois kind of life, fettered by a certain stupid 
grossness, a life that checked the free development of 
the soul. 

Pater's suggestive and poetical treatment of medie- 
val art fired a train, and tended to liberate an explosive 
revolutionary force of artistic feeling which manifested 
itself in intemperate extravagances for which he was 
indeed in no sense responsible, but which could be 
to a certain extent referred to his principles. Young 
men with vehement impulses, with no experience of 
the world, no idea of the solid and impenetrable weight 
of social traditions and prejudices, found in the prin- 
ciples enunciated by Pater with so much recondite 
beauty, so much magical charm, a new equation of 
values. Pater himself was to pay dearly for his guile- 
less sincerity, his frank confidence. 

In 1877, the year in which the second edition of the 
Renaissance was issued, appeared Mr. Mallock's New 
Republic. It is a difficult question to decide to what 
extent a satire of the kind is justifiable. It was an 
extraordinarily suggestive and humorous book; and 
the author would no doubt justly maintain that in Mr. 
Rose he was merely parodying a type of the aesthetic 
school ; but language was put into Mr. Rose's mouth 
which was obviously a faithful parody of Pater's style 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 53 

of writing, with an added touch of languor and extrava- 
gance. The bitterness of the satire was increased by- 
its being cast in a conversational form, so that it would 
be concluded by those who did not know Pater that 
his conversation in a mixed society was couched in this 
exotic and affected vein, reaching a degree of grotesque- 
ness on the one hand and sensuousness on the other 
which was bound to produce an unpleasant effect on 
the minds of readers. Mr. Rose is made to discourse 
in public in a dreamy vein in a manner which draws 
from Lady Ambrose, a conventional and worldly person, 
the comment that he always speaks of every one " as if 
they had no clothes on." But there are more disagree- 
able innuendoes than that ; and as it was inevitable 
from the language employed that Mr. Rose should be 
identified with Pater, it is hard to absolve the author 
from the charge of sacrificing the scrupulous justice 
that should have been shown to an individual to the 
desire for effectiveness and humour, though on the 
other hand an ample excuse is afforded in the youthful 
ebullience of the book, written, it is marvellous to 
reflect, when the author was still an undergraduate. 
Pater had indeed laid himself in one sense open to the 
attack, by committing to the impersonal medium of 
a book sentiments which could be distorted into the 
sensuous creed of aesthetes ; to satirise the advanced 
type of the aesthetic school was perfectly fair, but it was 
unduly harsh to cause an affected and almost licentious 
extravagance of behaviour to be attributed to one 
whose private life and conversation were of so sober 
and simple a character. It seems clear that the satire 
caused Pater considerable distress. If he had been 
personally vain or socially ambitious, it might have 
gratified him to be included in so distinguished a com- 
pany ; but all this was entirely foreign to his retired 



54 WALTER PATER [chap. 

and studious habits ; he did not at all desire to have a 
mysterious and somewhat painful prestige thrust upon 
him ; and though he seldom if ever spoke of the subject 
even to his most intimate friends, yet it is impossible 
not to realise that the satire must have caused him 
sincere pain. It was in this mood that he said to Mr. 
Gosse, " I wish they wouldn't call me a ' hedonist ' ; it 
produces such a bad effect on the minds of people 
who don't know Greek." He felt that he had been 
deliberately misrepresented, made unjustly notorious, 
and the sober and strenuous ideal of his life cruelly 
obscured. 

Although Pater had been a pupil of Jowett's, and 
although there was a rapprochement in later life, when 
Jowett took occasion warmly to congratulate Pater on 
his Plato and Platonism, there was a misunderstanding 
of some kind which resulted in a dissidence between 
them in the middle years. It has even been said that 
Jowett took up a line of definite opposition to Pater, 
and used his influence to prevent his obtaining Uni- 
versity work and appointments. It is not impossible 
that this was the case. Jowett, in spite of his genius, 
in spite of his liberality of view and his deliberate 
tolerance, was undoubtedly an opportunist. He was 
not exactly guided by the trend of public opinion, but 
he took care not to back men or measures unless he 
would be likely to have the support of a strong section 
of the community, or at least conceived it probable that 
his line would eventually be endorsed by public opinion. 
Thus his religious position was based not on the fact 
that he wished to be in opposition to popular ortho- 
doxy, but that he followed an enlightened line, with 
a belief that, in the long-run, the best intelligence of 
the country would adopt similar views. That this is 
not an over-statement is clear from Jowett's Life, where 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 55 

he is revealed as a far more liberal, even destructive 
critic of popular religion than he allowed to appear in 
either his writings or public utterances. 

Probably Jowett either identified Pater with the 
advanced aesthetic school, or supposed that at all events 
his teaching was adapted to strengthen a species of 
Hedonism, or modern Paganism, which was alien to 
the spirit of the age. Or possibly he was alarmed 
at the mental and moral attitude with which Pater 
was publicly credited, owing in considerable measure 
to the appearance of the New Republic — in which he 
himself was pilloried as the representative of advanced 
religious liberalism — and thought that on public 
grounds he must combat the accredited leaders of a 
movement which was certainly unfashionable, and 
which was regarded with suspicion by men of practi- 
cal minds. Whatever his motives were, he certainly 
meant to make it plain that he did not desire to see 
the supposed exponents of the aesthetic philosophy 
holding office in the University. 

One feels that Jowett, with his talent for frank 
remonstrance, had better have employed direct rather 
than indirect methods ; but the fact remains that he 
not only disliked the tendency of Pater's thought, 
but endeavoured, by means that are invariably in- 
effectual, to subvert his influence. 

It is not difficult to arrive at Pater's view of Jowett ; 
he regarded his qualities, both administrative and 
mental, with a considerable degree of admiration. He 
half envied and was half amused by the skilful way 
in which Jowett contrived, taught by adversity and 
opposition, to harmonise advanced religious views 
with popular conceptions, and to subordinate philo- 
sophical speculation to practical effectiveness. He con- 
sidered him an excellent specimen of the best kind of 



56 WALTER PATER [chap. 

virtuous sophist. A letter on the subject which he 
contributed in 1894 to the Life of Jowett is inter- 
esting. 

Speaking of his own undergraduate days, he says 
that Jowett's generosity in the matter of giving under- 
graduates help and encouragement in their work was 
unprecedented, 

" on the part of one whose fame among the youth, though he 
was then something of a recluse, was already established. 
Such fame rested on his great originality as a writer and 
thinker. He seemed to have taken the measure not merely 
of all opinions, but of all possible ones, and to have put the 
last refinements on literary expression. The charm of that 
was enhanced by a certain mystery about his own philosophic 
and other opinions. You know at that time his writings were 
thought by some to be obscure. These impressions of him 
had been derived from his Essays on St. Paul's Epistles, 
which at that time were much read and pondered by the more 
intellectual sort of undergraduates. When he lectured on 
Plato, it was a fascinating thing to see those qualities as if in 
the act of creation, his lectures being informal, unwritten, and 
seemingly unpremeditated, but with many a long-remembered 
gem of expression, or delightfully novel idea, which seemed to 
be lying in wait whenever, at a loss for a moment in his some- 
what hesitating discourse, he opened a book of loose notes. 
They passed very soon into other note-books all over the Uni- 
versity ; the larger part, but I think not all of them, into his 
published introductions to the Dialogues. Ever since I heard 
it, I have been longing to read a very dainty dialogue on 
language, which formed one of his lectures, a sort of ' New 
Cratylus.' " 

At the same time Pater had no sort of inner sym- 
pathy with Jowett's position as a priest of the Anglican 
Church, considering the opinions on the subject of 
Christian doctrine which he held, or which Pater 
believed him to hold. There is practically no doubt 



ii.] EARLY WRITINGS 57 

that in the review of Robert Elsmere which Pater con- 
tributed to the Guardian, he had Jowett in his mind 
in the following passage : — 

" Of course, a man such as Robert Elsmere came to be 
ought not to be a clergyman of the Anglican Church. The 
priest is still, and will, we think, remain, one of the necessary- 
types of humanity ; and he is untrue to his type, unless, with 
whatever inevitable doubts in this doubting age, he feels, on 
the whole, the preponderance in it of those influences which 
make for faith. It is his triumph to achieve as much faith as 
possible in an age of negation. Doubtless, it is part of the 
ideal of the Anglican Church that, under certain safeguards, it 
should find room for latitudinarians even among its clergy. 
Still, with these, as with all other genuine priests, it is the 
positive not the negative result that justifies the position. We 
have little patience with those liberal clergy who dwell on 
nothing else than the difficulties of faith and the propriety of 
concession to the opposite force." 

The truth is that the two temperaments were radi- 
cally opposed, though they had certain philosophical 
interests in common. At bottom Jowett was a man 
of the world, and valued effectiveness above most 
qualities ; while Pater set no particular value upon 
administrative energy. Jowett was indifferent to art, 
except in so far as it ministered to agreeable social 
intercourse; with Pater art provided what were the 
deepest and most sacred experiences of his life. Not 
until Pater became a growing power in the literary 
and artistic world, not until it became clear that 
he had no practical sympathy with the exponents 
of a bastard aestheticism, did Jowett recognise the 
fame of his former pupil ; and as the respect of Jowett, 
when conceded to persons with whom he did not 
agree, may be recognised as having a certain value of 
barometrical indication, as reflecting the opinion of the 



58 WALTER PATER [chap. ii. 

world in a species of enlightened mirror, we may con- 
sider that Jowett's expressed admiration of Plato and 
Platonism was a belated admission that Pater had in- 
dubitably attained to the eminence which the Pro- 
fessor of Greek had long before prophesied for him. 



CHAPTER III 

OXFORD LIFE 

The years that succeeded the first publication of 
the Renaissance were not years of very strenuous 
literary work. Pater was at this time holding the 
Tutorship of the College, as well as lecturing, and the 
official business connected with the post was consider- 
able. A tutor is supposed to exert a general super- 
vision over the work of his pupils, to criticise their 
compositions and essays, and to keep himself informed 
of their progress. It cannot be said that Pater's 
practical effectiveness was strong enough to equip him 
adequately for the task. He received and criticised 
the essays ; he responded with cordial sympathy to any 
direct appeals for assistance ; but a tutor, to be effec- 
tive, must have a power of shining, like the sun, upon 
the eager and the reluctant, the grateful and the 
unthankful alike; .some pupils must be impulsively 
inspired ; some delicately encouraged ; some ironically 
chastised ; some few must, like the image of Democracy 
in Tennyson's poem, " toil onward, prick'd with goads 
and stings." 

Pater had little capacity for this kind of work — in- 
deed, he did not even conceive it to be his duty ; but 
in any case the mere routine-work was heavy. More- 
over, he had to a certain extent come out of his shell, 
enjoyed a good deal of quiet sociability, and gained a 
reputation as a brilliant and paradoxical talker. 



60 WALTER PATER [chap. 

Meanwhile, as I have said, his literary output was 
small. His study of " Wordsworth " (1874) is a very 
subtle piece of criticism. It is often taken for granted 
that Wordsworth valued tranquillity above ardour, and 
thus the essay is peculiarly felicitous in pointing out 
that not mere contemplation, but impassioned contempla- 
tion, was the underlying purpose of the poet's life. 
Pater shows that Wordsworth's choice of incidents 
and situations from common life was made " not for 
their tameness, but for (their) passionate sincerity." 
He indicates that the reason why Wordsworth selected 
the homelier figures of the world for his protagonists 
was that he might display " all the pathetic episodes 
of their humble existence, their longing, their wonder 
at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, like the 
pleasures of children, won so hardly in the struggle 
for bare existence ; their yearning towards each other, 
in their darkened houses, or at their early toil." 

It is too customary with critics to draw a sharp 
line between Wordsworth in his moments of inspired 
passion and Wordsworth in the mood of solemn in- 
effectiveness ; and thus those who write on Wordsworth 
too often view his work with a certain impatience, as 
if by an effort he could have criticised himself, and 
made a more emphatic selection of his own writings. 
But Pater, though he echoes the wish that Words- 
worth could have been more severe in the matter of 
omission, shows the essential unity of his work, arising 
from the deliberate passivity with which he waited 
dutifully upon the gift of inspiration ; and he com- 
pares him beautifully to " one of those early Italian 
or Flemish painters, who, just because their minds 
were full of heavenly visions, passed, some of them, 
the better part of sixty years in quiet, systematic 
industry." 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 61 

In fact, Pater realised, perhaps unconsciously, that 
what Wordsworth had written in the " Poet's Epitaph" 
was as true of Wordsworth himself; — " And you must 
love him, ere to you he will seem worthy of your 
love " ; and thus the spirit in which he deals with 
Wordsworth's work is one of a reverent tenderness, 
that cannot even bear to speak with the least rough- 
ness or harshness of the writings of one so sincere, 
so wise, so deep-hearted, even when engaged in 
the task of producing arid and pompous couplets, 
or rubbing, as Matthew Arnold says, like Indians in 
primeval forests, one dry stick upon another in the 
hope of generating a flame. 

Pater is particularly alive to Wordsworth's deep 
sense of what may be called the admonitus locorum, the 
local sanctities, the far-reaching human associations 
with places, dealing with them largely, " till the low 
walls, the green mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs 
seemed full of voices." 

Again, Pater skilfully divines Wordsworth's peculiar 
power " of realising, and conveying to the conscious- 
ness of the reader, abstract and elementary impressions 
— silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness : or, again, 
the whole complex sentiment of a particular place, the 
abstract expression of desolation in the long white 
road, of peacefulness in a particular folding of the 
hills." 

It is abundantly clear that, in the case of Words- 
worth, Pater felt himself drawing near to a highly 
congenial personality. He speaks in another essay of 
the poet's "flawless temperament, his fine mountain 
atmosphere of mind." The dignity, the seriousness, 
the quietness, the impassioned quality of the poet's 
life made a strong appeal to him, and not less the high 
purpose to which he dedicated his whole life: the 



62 WALTER PATER [chap. 

rendering and interpreting of beantifnl impressions, 
the desire to impart to others what gave him joy and 
tranquillity ; and thus the whole essay is redolent of 
a sort of trustful affection, the mood in which a man 
speaks simply and sincerely of a point of view which 
he instinctively admires, a character that is very dear 
to his heart. Pater goes, indeed, so far as to say in a 
later essay that a careful reading of Wordsworth is 
probably the very best thing that can be found to 
counteract the faults and offences of our busy and 
restless generation, as helping to remind us, "amid 
the enormous expansion of all that is material and 
mechanical in life, of the essential value, the perma- 
nent ends, of life itself." 

The essay on "Charles Lamb" (1878) is another in- 
stance of Pater's power of selecting and emphasising 
the congenial elements of a character. It is not the 
inconsequent, the reckless humour of Charles Lamb 
that Pater values most, his power of pursuing a 
humorous image, of clinging to it, as Lamb did among 
the rubs and adversities of the world, as a man in a 
beating sea might cling to a spar for his life. Pater 
is rather in love with the contrast of Lamb's life, the 
tragic undercurrent of fate, that ran like a dark stream 
below his lightness, his pathetic merriment. He ad- 
mires him as an artist first, because " in the making of 
prose he realises the principle of art for its own sake, 
as completely as Keats in the making of verse." He 
values him for the " little arts of happiness he is ready 
to teach to others," for his deep and patient friend- 
ships ; he sees in him " a lover of household warmth 
everywhere," a collector of things which gain a colour 
for him " by the little accidents which attest previous 
ownership." He loves him because he "has a care 
for the sighs, and the weary, humdrum preoccupations 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 63 

of very weak people, down to their little pathetic 
' gentilities/ even ; while, in the purely human temper, 
he can write of death, almost like Shakespeare." 
"Unoccupied," he says, " as he might seem, with great 
matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real, 
especially in its caressing littleness, that littleness in 
which there is much of the whole woeful heart of 
things, and meets it more than half-way with a perfect 
understanding of it." He realises, too, the fineness 
and largeness of Lamb's criticism ; he says that when 
Lamb comments on Shakespeare, he is like "a man 
who walks alone under a grand stormy sky, and among 
unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might 
seem to be abroad upon the air " ; and he does, too, 
full justice to Lamb's poetical appreciation of London. 
" Nowhere," he says, in the melodious concluding sen- 
tence, "is there so much difference (as in London) 
between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the clouds 
roll together more grandly . . . the background of 
the great city, with its weighty atmosphere, and por- 
tent of storm in the rapid light on dome and bleached 
stone steeples." 

Perhaps it may be thought that Pater's judgment 
of Lamb is coloured by too strong an infusion of his 
own personality, and that the Charles Lamb of the 
essay is hardly recognisable, clothed, as he appears to 
be, in his critic's very wardrobe ; that Pater puts aside 
certain broad aspects of Lamb's character as being less 
congenial to himself ; but I should rather myself feel 
that he has indeed passed behind the smiling mask 
which Lamb often wore, or has, perhaps, persuaded 
him to doff it; and that he has thus got nearer, in 
fact, to this melancholy loving spirit, with its self- 
condemned indulgences, its vein of mockery, its long 
spaces of dreariness, its acute sensibilities. Lamb, 



64 WALTER PATER [chap. 

one feels, was a pilgrim in hard places, and, like 
Bunyan's pilgrims, caught desperately at the fruits 
that hung over the wall to relieve his sadness; and 
yet, in another mood, he was full of a tender quietism, 
with a large and loving outlook upon humanity and 
life. Pater seems to have come from reading Lamb 
like a friend who has been communing with a friend. 
They have talked without affectation and without dis- 
guises ; and thus one feels that, though there has been, 
under the influence of sympathy, a certain suppression 
or suspension of modes of speech, of aspects of thought, 
that had a real bearing on Lamb's character, yet that 
Pater has seen the innermost heart of the man with 
the insight that only affection can give, an insight 
which subtler and harder critics seem to miss, even 
though the picture they may draw is incontestably 
truer to detail. 

Besides these two critical appreciations, Pater wrote 
at this time a Shakespearian study, and the little essay 
on "Romanticism," which re-appeared in 1889 as the 
Postscript to Appreciations, which may be shortly dis- 
cussed here. 

It has a high value. It is a careful attempt to find a 
definition for the two terms classical and romantic. Pater 
sees with perspicuous clearness that one of the diffi- 
culties of finding a precise formula for large terms, 
expressive of tendency, is the disentangling them 
from the loose, conventional, and conversational sense 
that they come to bear. Thus he says of the word 
classical, that " it has often been used in a hard, and 
merely scholastic sense, by the praisers of what is old and 
accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics 
who would never have discovered for themselves the 
charm of any work, whether new or old, who value 
what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, and 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 65 

chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered 
about it — people who would never really have been 
made glad by any Venus fresh-risen from the sea, and 
who praise the Venus of old Greece and Rome, only 
because they fancy her grown now into something 
staid and tame." 

He says that the charm of classical literature is the 
charm of the " well-known tale, to which we can, never- 
theless, listen over and over again, because it is told so 
well. To the absolute beauty of its artistic form, is 
added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity." 
" It comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, 
as the measure of what a long experience has shown 
will at least never displease us." 

But the romantic spirit is that which craves for new 
motives, new subjects of interest, new modifications of 
style: its essence is the addition of strangeness to 
beauty ; its danger is to value what is after all in- 
artistic — anything that is bizarre, strained, exagger- 
ated. Pater contrasts Pope and Balzac as instances 
of the defects of the two styles, — Pope's lack of curi- 
osity producing insipidity, and Balzac's excess of 
curiosity not being duly tempered with the desire of 
beauty ; and with singular felicity he selects the Plii- 
loctetes of Sophocles as a typically romantic book, but 
yet with all the tranquillity of the classical spirit. 

Pater shows that romanticism generally arises, as in 
Prance with Eousseau, after a long period of stagna- 
tion and ennui. But after all the essence of the situa- 
tion lies in the fact that, as Stendhal says, all good art 
was romantic in its clay ; and thus the charm of 
romanticism is the charm of the spring, of the unfold- 
ing of new forms, and strangely shaped flowers, and 
scented fruits ; the charm of classicism is the charm 
that creeps over the same landscape with the mellow 



6Q WALTER PATER [chap. 

richness of autumn; and Pater sums up the whole 
subject by saying that " in truth, the legitimate conten- 
tion is, not of one age or school of literary art against 
another, but of all successive schools alike, against the 
stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the 
vulgarity which is dead to form." 

The conclusion, then, for Pater is that our work 
should unite the true qualities of both romanticism 
and classicalism ; that it should be fresh, new, spon- 
taneous, and unconventional ; decorous, but not ham- 
pered by decorum; gaining soberness and richness 
from recognised methods and due authority; but in 
the truest sense a development, neither a new de- 
parture nor a servile imitation. We are not to think 
slightingly of the old forms, or to neglect the hallowed 
influences of association ; authority must control the 
manner, vitality suggest the matter. And in all this 
Pater is true to his creed, clinging as he did to the old 
forms of melodies and enriching them with new har- 
monies. He is content, indeed, to look backwards with 
reverent eyes upon the past ; but he is all alive with 
the problems of the present, the hopes of the future. 

And thus the essay comes to have a direct value, 
because in it he summarises and reflects, stating the 
truth positively, and not by allusion and in allegories. 
It is in a sense one of the manifestoes scattered through 
his writings ; and it testifies to his belief, which one 
might forget in his dwelling upon the old and the 
established, that he was in heart upon the side of the 
new, the inquisitive, the expansive ; that his work 
indeed is only critical in form, but essentially creative 
in spirit. 

He wrote too, at this time, the essay on the " School 
of Giorgione," which was added to the Renaissance 
essays in the third edition, and which has already 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 67 

been discussed. But his main concern was with the 
Greek Studies. "Demeter and Persephone" was de- 
livered in the form of two lectures at the Birmingham 
and Midland Institute in 1875 and appeared in the 
Fortnightly Review in 1876. In the same year and in 
the same magazine appeared the "Dionysus." As 
then the most solid and vigorous sections of the 
Greek Studies were the work of these years, it will be 
better to speak of the book here, rather than at the 
date of its eventual publication (1895). 

I do not mean here to dwell at any great length 
upon the volume, beautiful as the Studies are, because 
they are so strongly intermingled with the antiquarian 
and the scholarly element that they require a famili- 
arity with classical learning, a special sort of initiation, 
to comprehend them. They are fully but not heavily 
freighted with erudition, and testify to a long and 
patient accumulation of facts and traditions. When 
the accumulation was complete — and it must have been 
a task of great labour — the details had to be touched 
as lightly and placed as expressively as possible. And 
they thus stand as an excellent work of art, and testify 
to the shaping into finished and balanced studies of a 
mass of technical and professional material. 

To indicate them briefly in detail, the first is a study 
of " Dionysus," which touches with innumerable mys- 
tical and poetical suggestions the bright, gay, ruthless 
figure of the god, alive from head to foot, thrilling 
with the joy of life and beauty, and, with a divinely 
unassailed temperance of his own ; as he passes lightly 
in his robe of skins, poising his wand with the bare 
brown arm, carrying in his hand the strange secret of 
the vine, its heady visions, its power of overwhelming 
by a sort of resistless, poisonous energy the mortal 
spirit, heightening and gilding on the one hand its 



68 WALTER PATER [chap. 

bright fancies and sparkling dreams into a sort of 
mysterious rapture, an inner careless glee ; and on the 
other hand sinking melancholy thoughts into an aban- 
doned and exaggerated grief, and at last merging both 
joy and grief together into a deep stupor of mind and 
body. We Northerners, with the inherited taste for 
potent and ardent beverages, as resources to fight 
against our cheerless skies, our damp mists, our aching 
frosts, enlightened, too, by the later researches of 
natural philosophers, who have explained the magic 
of intoxication as a sort of unseemly poisoning of mind 
and body alike, are apt to view the effects of wine as 
an essentially grotesque and commonplace thing; we 
forget what a mystery this fierce excitement, this 
strange imported ecstasy of soul, the cloudy following 
lethargy might mean, would mean to those to whom 
the whole of life was a commerce with the divine, and 
who felt themselves surrounded by secret and unseen 
influences. And then, too, we must bear in mind that 
tendency of personification which lay so close to the 
heart of these old nations. With us it is all the other 
way ; we tend to refer all things to a vast unity of law, 
to prodigious impersonal forces, thereby drawing, no 
doubt, nearer to truth, but further and further away 
from the romance that appeals to simple minds. 

Thus to the Greeks the worship of the grape was 
a discerning of "the spirit of fire and dew, alive and 
leaping in a thousand vines." The rites of Dionysus 
were holy things, " breaths of remote nature . . . the 
pines, the foldings of the hills, the leaping streams, the 
strange echoings and dying of sound on the heights." 
Dionysus, thus, was a spirit of fire and dew; of fire 
first : — 

"And who," says Pater, "that has rested a hand on the 
glittering silex of a vineyard slope in August, where the pale 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 69 

globes of sweetness are lying, does not feel this ? It is out of 
the bitter salts of a smitten, volcanic soil that it comes up with 
the most curious virtues. ... In thinking of Dionysus, then, 
as fire-born, the Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment, 
the poetry, of all tender things which grow out of a hard 
soil, or in any sense blossom before the leaf, like the little 
mezereon-plant of English gardens, with its pale-purple, wine- 
scented flowers upon the leafless twigs in February, or like the 
almond-trees of Tuscany, or Aaron's rod that budded, or the 
staff in the hand of the Pope when Tannh'auser's repentance 
is accepted." 

And then, too, Dionysus is born of the dew — of the 
freshness, the solace, of liquid in a hot land. 

" Think of the darkness of the well in the breathless court, 
with the delicate ring of ferns kept alive just within the open- 
ing; of the sound of the fresh water flowing through the 
wooden pipesinto the houses of Venice, on summer mornings." 

It is this combining of symbolism that Pater believes 
to be so characteristic of the Greek sentiment : " the 
religious imagination of the Greeks being, precisely, 
a unifying or identifying power, bringing together 
things naturally asunder, making, as it were, for the 
human body a soul of waters, for the human soul a 
body of flowers." 

And with it all, in the conception of this mystical 
impassioned Deity, goes a deep sadness, the sadness of 
one who is old though everlastingly young, who has 
seen a thousand fair things fade, year after year, the 
flowers withering in the sheltered places, the trees 
losing their rich summer foliage ; he has seen genera- 
tion after generation arise in grace and beauty, thirst- 
ing for life, coming with new wonder to taste the sweet 
mysteries ; and they too have gone ; he knows the 
secrets of the grave ; he knows that though new life 
arises, the old life, the old passionate identities, are not 



70 WALTER PATER [chap. 

restored. He himself defies death and the violence 
of traitorous people, infuriated by the sorrows that 
follow so hard in the path -of joy ; he is slain, but 
arises again with strength renewed and sadness in- 
creased ; thus the vision glows, and fades, and glows 
again. 

It is in vain to ask ourselves whether the whole of 
this body of symbolism was ever present in any mind 
or group of minds. That is not the concern of Pater ; 
his thought is rather to trace the many clear streams 
that have ever flowed within the single channel. He 
gathers the waters in a heap, as the prophet of old said. 
And the value of the essay is that it reveals something 
of the freshness and richness of the Greek mind, the 
exquisite power of seeing the beauty of sweet and 
simple things, of interweaving them into joyful fancies, 
embodying them into strange high-hearted tales ; this 
tendency is the exact opposite of our own Celtic 
tendency, which loses itself in a vague and wistful 
melancholy in the thought of desolate spirits full of 
sorrow, that find their natural home in the soft weeping 
world, the moors in which the rain drops pitifully, the 
lonely hills. With the Greeks the sense of presences 
behind life, hovering near, revealing themselves in half- 
glimpses, took shape in the bright sparkling pageant of 
life — life that is determined in its brief space to press 
out the most poignant qualities of sorrow and laughter, 
of love and song. 

In the " Bacchanals of Euripides " the same point is 
touched on a different side ; here we see the intoxicat- 
ing sense of life and spring, the tingling impulse of the 
dance, coming out in the group of worshippers, the 
women who surround the woman-like god, touching 
thought exclusively through the senses. To these was 
given to feel " the presence of night, the expectation of 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 71 

morning, the nearness of wild, unsophisticated, natural 
things — the echoes, the coolness, the noise of frightened 
creatures as they climbed through the darkness, the 
sunrise seen from the hill-tops, the disillusion, the 
bitterness of satiety, the deep slumber which comes 
with the morning." 

Pater traces the plot of the strange beauty-haunted 
play, with its grotesque episodes, such as the indignity 
of the Bacchic passion seizing upon the old fatuous 
men, horribly renewing their youth in a kind of shame- 
less parody of childish merriment, up to the appalling 
tragedy of the end, the doom of scepticism that yet 
involves a house and a nation in speechless grief and 
horror. 

In the " Myth of Demeter and Persephone," which 
Pater said had been the most laborious and diffi- 
cult piece of work he had ever done, he traces the 
complex shadowy legend from its early origins. The 
Mother of Nature, with her power over the kindly 
fruits of the earth, is first depicted ; and then in the 
midst of her passionless content, her easy benevolence, 
her daughter is snatched away to be queen among the 
dead ; the mother, in a sad indifference of grief, sets 
out stony-hearted on the quest, sometimes blasting, 
sometimes blessing the earth through which she passes, 
losing, in the stress of that bitter sorrow, the balance 
of mind, the responsibility, which her influence had 
brought her. Pater shows that behind all the bright- 
ness, the hopefulness, the impassioned geniality of the 
Greek creed, there lay a shadow : — 

" The < worship of sorrow/ as Goethe called it, is some- 
times supposed to have had almost no place in the religion of 
the Greeks. Their religion has been represented as a religion 
of mere cheerfulness, the worship by an untroubled, unreflect- 
ing humanity, conscious of no deeper needs, of the embodi- 



72 WALTER PATER [chap. 

ments of its own joyous activity. It helped to hide out of 
their sight those traces of decay and weariness, of which the 
Greeks were constitutionally shy, to keep them from peeping 
too curiously into certain shadowy places, appropriate enough 
to the gloomy imagination of the middle age ; and it hardly 
proposed to itself to give consolation to people who, in truth, 
were never ' sick or sorry.' But this familiar view of Greek 
religion is based on a consideration of a part only of what is 
known concerning it, and really involves a misconception, akin 
to that which underestimates the influence of the romantic 
spirit generally, in Greek poetry and art ; as if Greek art had 
dealt exclusively with human nature in its sanity, suppressing 
all motives of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of 
difficulty, permitting nothing but an Olympian, though per- 
haps somewhat wearisome calm. In effect, such a conception 
of Greek art and poetry leaves in the central expressions of 
Greek culture none but negative qualities; and the legend of 
Demeter and Persephone, perhaps the most popular of all 
Greek legends, is sufficient to show that the 'worship of 
sorrow ' was not without its function in Greek religion ; their 
legend is a legend made by and for sorrowful, wistful, anxious 
people; while the most important artistic monuments of that 
legend sufficiently prove that the Romantic spirit was really 
at work in the minds of Greek artists, extracting by a kind of 
subtle alchemy, a beauty, not without the elements of tran- 
quillity, of dignity and order, out of a matter, at first sight 
painful and strange." 

But perhaps the most important dictum which Pater 
lays down in the essay is this — that " in the applica- 
tion of these theories, the student of Greek religion 
must never forget that, after all, it is with poetry, not 
with systematic theological belief or dogma, that he 
has to do." 

In the second part of the essay he traces the 
myth through its treatment by many hands, the hands 
of poets, the hands of sculptors, each adding something 
of their own restless and eager personality to these 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 73 

figures of the " goddesses of the earth, akin to the 
influence of cool places, quiet houses, subdued light, 
tranquillising voices." 

It is here that he conceives the secret to lie — that in 
the perceptions of these old imaginings we may not 
only draw nearer to the heart of the ancient world, 
but that they may bring us too, by sweet association 
and delicate shadowy imagery, some uplifting and en- 
larging of our own sympathies and hopes. 

The "Hippolytus Veiled" (1889) is a much later 
work, but it will be as well to treat of it here, though 
it belongs less to the stricter archaeological studies, and 
more to the series of Imaginary Portraits. Pater takes 
the old sad legend of Hippolytus, the child of Theseus 
and an Amazon, the type of a stainless and almost 
froward chastity, which brings with it the penalty of 
the scorning of divine influence, of natural law ; and 
embroiders out of it an elaborate and beautiful story, 
heaped with rich and fervid accessories. He points out 
first the exquisite finish, the clear-cut detail, which char- 
acterises even the smallest and daintiest of Greek le- 
gends; "the impression of Greece generally," he says, is 
"but enhanced by the littleness of the physical scene of 
events intellectually so great — such a system of grand 
lines, restrained within so narrow a compass, as in one 
of its fine coins." And thus he illustrates that salient 
characteristic of Greek life — the absence of centralisa- 
tion, the intensity with which so vivid a life burnt 
sharply at so many provincial centres simultaneously. 
Then comes the story, the noble child so carefully 
nurtured by the desolate sorrowing mother, acquiring 
in and through her woe all the arts of simple seemly 
living, in order that she may delicately nurture the 
child of her fall. Pater brings the lonely cave-life 
before one — the wax-tapers, the hunger of the boy so 



74 WALTER PATER [chap. 

daintily satisfied, his eager prattling alertness, the joy- 
ful days, overshadowed only by the thought that they 
were surely passing. Then the boy passes on to the 
greater world, becomes renowned in all manly exercises, 
but keeps his purity unsullied, even in the perfumed 
chambers of the palace, face to face with the feverish 
desire of the shameless Phaedra. " He had a marvellous 
air of discretion about him, as of one never to be caught 
unaware, as if he never could be anything but like 
water from the rock, or the wild flowers of the morn- 
ing, or the beams of the morning star turned to human 
flesh." Repulsed and mad with jealous shame, Phaedra 
whispers the traitorous tale to Theseus, who utters a 
curse upon the boy, so that he falls into a wasting 
sickness. Even so the gods are merciful ; he struggles 
back to life, to lose it again before the wrath of 
Poseidon, or even perhaps of Aphrodite herself, as he 
drives his chariot along the shore. The earth rocks, a 
great wave whitens on the beach ; the horses plunge 
and start, and he is buffeted to death among the sea- 
boulders and the crawling brine. 

The tale has a curious magic about it ; but though 
Greek in outline, it is hardly Greek in quality, suffused 
as it is with a strange and wistful romance that is 
born of a later and more self-conscious age. 

In the essays on the " Beginnings of Greek Sculp- 
ture" he touches on the possibilities of external 
influences, the hints from the East, from Egypt, 
Assyria, Phoenicia, Asia Minor, Cyprus, as forming 
possibly the seed of Greek art. But he points out 
truly that this art is all " emphatically autochthonous, as 
the Greeks said, new-born at home, by right of a new, 
informing, combining spirit playing over those mere 
elements, and touching them, above all, with a wonder- 
ful sense of the nature and destiny of man — the 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 75 

dignity of his soul and of his body — so that in all 
things the Greeks are as discoverers." 

And he points out, too, that we are apt to import too 
purely an intellectual element into our conceptions of 
Greek art, because we have to deal with it principally 
in the form of sculpture, the only product that remains 
to us in large measure, while their pictures, their metal 
work, their carvings, their embroideries, have suffered 
a natural decay. Pater deals first with the descriptions 
of ancient shields, and with the excavated treasures of 
Mycenae, and points out that this metal work, with its 
special cachet, " the seal of nearness to the workman's 
hand," and the Greek tendency to overlay stone as far 
as possible with metal, show that Greek art probably 
first displayed itself in this form, and was in reality 
the expression of an age of gold rather than of 
stone. 

In the second essay he traces the growth of true 
sculpture, the gradual preference of marble as a medium 
for art, until the first school of sculptors appears 
at Sicyon, the chief seat in earliest days of Greek 
art. Here he depends mostly upon the authority of 
Pausanias ; " our own fancy," he says, " must fill up the 
story of the unrecorded patience of the workshop, into 
which we seem to peep through these scanty notices — 
the fatigue, the disappointments, the steps repeated, 
ending at last in that moment of success, which is all 
Pausanias records, somewhat uncertainly." 

He shows that in the detachment of images from 
the walls and pillars behind them, Greek art was 
already liberated from its earlier Eastern associations, 
which worked only in reliefs and friezes; and then 
came the perception that sculpture was not to be a 
thing of mechanical and mathematical proportions, 
but the representation of a living organism with free- 



76 WALTER PATER [chap. 

dom of movement, full of the human soul, instead of a 
mere stiff attitude and a frozen gesture. 

And then religion comes in to swell the richness 
of art, and the vague customs and traditions of the 
older days transform themselves into the breathing 
images of personal gods enshrined and enthroned. 

The essay ends with an attempt to indicate the 
characteristics of the great school of Sicyon as repre- 
sented by Canachus — a sculptor, it would seem, of deep 
religious feeling, and distinguished by that early stiff 
naivete of work which indicates " a gravity, a discretion 
and reserve, the charm of which, if felt in quiet, is 
hardly less than that of the wealth and fulness of final 
mastery." 

In "The Marbles of Aegina" Pater discusses the 
quality of the beautiful group of sculpture discovered 
in 1811 in a ruined temple of Athene in a remote part 
of Aegina, and purchased for the Munich Gallery by 
King Louis i. of Bavaria. The interest of this group 
is that it seems the consummate flower of Dorian as 
opposed to Ionian art, dating probably from about 
the time of Marathon. 

Pater skilfully contrasts the Ionian tendency of 
thought — the brilliant, diffused, undirected play of 
imagination, its restless versatility, its extreme indi- 
vidualism — with the Dorian influence of severe sys- 
tem atisation, the subordination of the individual to the 
state ; the group has the characteristics of the purest 
Greek chivalry ; he shows the " dry earnestness " of the 
craftsman, " with a sort of hard strength in detail, a 
scrupulousness verging on stiffness, like that of an 
early Flemish painter,' 7 and withal " his still youthful 
sense of pleasure in the experience of the first rudi- 
mentary difficulties of his art overcome." 

" In this monument, ..." he says, " pensive and visionary 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 77 

as it may seem, those old Greek knights live with a truth like 
that of Homer or Chaucer. In a sort of stiff grace, combined 
with a sense of things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the 
Aeginetan workman is as it were the Chaucer of Greek 
sculpture." 

In the last of the Studies, " The Age of Athletic 
Prizemen," composed twenty years later than the 
earliest essays, Pater traces the effect of the athletic 
system of Greece upon their sculpture. The pride of 
health, of perfect agility, of graceful movement, all 
concentrated upon the end in view, the perfect balance 
of mind and body alike — these were the ends which 
that system had in view — how different from our own 
gloomy and commercial athletics ! 

The pride of the sculptor was to combine the 
mystery of motion and of rest, to seize a moment 
of intense energy — "the twinkling heel and ivory 
shoulder" of the runner, "the tense nerve and full- 
flushed vein," and to set it for ever in the imperishable 
stillness of art. And further, behind the suppleness, 
the delicate muscularity, the unspoiled freshness, of 
youth, to imprint if possible the mark of true 
humanity upon those figures, the kind and simple 
heart, the modest smile, the stainless purity of soul. 
And again, in those funeral monuments of young 
creatures snatched away before their time, to comfort 
the mourner by some hint of the dignity, the tran- 
quillising secret of death. 

Pater takes the work of Myron and of Polycleitus as 
the perfect expression of humanity — "humanity, with 
a glowing, yet restrained joy and delight in itself, but 
without vanity ; and it is pure." 

" To have achieved just that," he writes, " was the Greek's 
truest claim for furtherance in the main line of human de- 
velopment. He had been faithful, we cannot help sayiug . . . 



78 WALTER PATER [chap. 

in the culture, the administration, of the visible world ; and he 
merited, so we might go on to say — he merited Revelation, 
something which should solace his heart in the inevitable 
fading of that." 

It is here, perhaps, that the deepest value of these 
Studies lies. Pater penetrates by patient skill, by 
ardent sympathy, the glowing, simple, straightforward 
life of the old world, with its light-hearted mirth, 
its swift acquiescence in things as they are. 

But he realises throughout that it is over and gone ; 
that we cannot win it back ; but that it may cheer 
and enlarge our view of life, our admiration for those 
sunny spaces of history, if we can but apprehend it ; 
and that we may win from it some tranquillity, some 
brightness of spirit, which may fall on our heavier 
hearts, our bewildered sophisticated minds, like fresh 
winds blowing over the hills from the gates of the 
morning. That it cannot wholly satisfy us he has no 
doubt ; but that it may enliven and widen our minds 
he is not less assured. 

Up to this date Pater's work had been critical ; it 
has been pointed out that it was never purely critical, 
but a species of poetical and interpretative criticism, of 
a creative order, working upon slender hints and em- 
ploying artistic productions as texts and motifs for 
imaginative creation. 

But he now began to feel the impulse to produce 
original creative work, and to use his own impressions, 
his experiences, his speculations as material for imagi- 
native treatment. 

His only critical work for the next three years con- 
sisted of the Essay on " Charles Lamb " which we have 
already considered, a slight Shakespearian essay on 
" Love's Labours Lost," and three of the Greek Studies. 
But the year 1878 is memorable for the first appearance 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 79 

of one of his most beautiful works, the one, in fact, 
which can be recommended to any one unacquainted 
with Pater's writings, as exhibiting most fully his char- 
acteristic charm. 

TJie Child in the House is the sweetest and ten- 
derest of all Pater's fancies, the work, we may say, 
where his art approached most nearly to a kind of 
music. We have before indicated the autobiographical 
vein of the piece, but it remains to say something of 
the art of the essay, which is conceived in a certain 
golden mood of retrospect, and makes an appeal to all 
who, however rarely, indulge a train of gentle recollec- 
tion. Such a mood is wrought in us by a sort of 
sudden charm; the sight of old places where we have 
lived untroubled days brings it back with a wistful 
swiftness, so that we feel a yearning desire, it may be, 
for our own unstained past; we contrast what we are 
and what we have become, with what we were and 
with what we might have been. This mood, a sort 
of "death in life" as Tennyson says, may surprise 
natures overlaid with conventionalism and even coarse- 
ness. It is one of the commonest and most forcible, 
because truest, effects of pathos, in books that aim 
at dramatic effect, when the crust of later careless 
habit suddenly breaks, and the old clear stream 
of life seems to be running there below all the 
while. 

Such an experience may hold within it, even for 
the most worldly and hardened minds, a hope of im- 
mortality, a hope of redemption. That strange and 
yearning hunger of the heart for a purity, a simplicity, 
which it once had, before the bitter root of evil sent up 
its poisonous flowers into the soul, is one of the most 
primal emotions of nature. It is in such a mood that 
a man is apt to feel most self-forgiving, most self- 



80 WALTER PATER [chap. 

pitying, because he feels that it is circumstance and 
seduction of sense that have marred a nature that in 
itself desired purity and simplicity. It is not perhaps 
the highest of emotions, because it is a mood in which 
life would seem to hold no lessons but the lesson of in- 
evitable decline, ungenerous deterioration 5 but there is 
no denying its strength, its sad charm. 

In The Child in the House we see a boy deeply 
sensitive to beautiful impressions, to all the quiet joys, 
the little details of home: its carved balusters and 
shadowy angles, its scents and sounds, its effects of 
light and shade, and further abroad, the trees of 
the garden, the hawthorn bush, with its "bleached 
and twisted trunk and branches "... with the fresh 
bloom — "a plumage of tender crimson fire out of 
the heart of the dry wood" — the shops of the city 
hard by, the belfry with its giddy winding stair, — 
"half, tint and trace and accident of homely 
colour and form, from the wood and the bricks; 
half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows 
how far. " 

And then, too, we see the child's love for the out- 
ward forms of religion; "the comely order of the sanc- 
tuary, the secrets of its white linen, and holy vessels, 
and fonts of pure water; and its hieratic purity and 
simplicity became the type of something he desired 
always to have about him in actual life. He pored 
over the pictures in religious books, and knew by heart 
the exact mode in which the wrestling angel grasped 
Jacob, how Jacob looked in his mysterious sleep, how 
the bells and pomegranates were attached to the hem 
of Aaron's vestment, sounding sweetly as he glided 
over the turf of the holy place." 

Over this quiet and untroubled mood the shadow 
creeps. The boy begins to feel the touch of sorrow, of 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 81 

loss, of bereavement — the shadow of death. A cry- 
heard on the stairs tells how the news of a death comes 
home to an aged heart ; the little household pet, the 
Angora cat, sickens and dies, the tiny soul nickering 
away from the body ; the young starling is caught and 
caged, but the boy cannot resist the cries of the mother- 
bird, the " sharp bound of the prisoner up to her nest- 
lings," and lets the sorrowing creature go. 

One realises with a painful intensity with what a 
shock of bewildered emotion Pater must have realised 
as a child the first lessons of mortality, " the contact," 
as he wrote long afterwards, " of childhood with the 
great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which children 
can enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with 
a kind of simple, pathetic greatness, to the discipline 
of the heart." 

Yet in this region there falls a certain vein of what 
may be called macabre, which might be thought mor- 
bid were it not obviously so natural — a dwelling on 
the accidents of mortality, the gradations of decay. 

" He would think of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, 
as spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin like pale amber, and 
his honey-like hair ; of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from the 
lilies, from golden summer days, from women's voices ; and 
then what comforted him a little was the thought of the 
turning of the child's flesh to violets in the turf above him." 

There is very little of human emotion in the vision ; 
little dwelling upon companionship and near affections 
and relationships ; and this is true to nature. The 
child whose nature is thus sensuously perceptive is 
often so much taken up by mere impression, by the 
varied, the enchanting outsides of things, the curious 
forms, the play of colour, the ray of sunlight like gold- 
dust, the light cast up from the snow upon the ceilings 



82 WALTER PATER [chap. 

of rooms, that there is little leisure, little energy, to 
give to the simple affections of life. In this the 
picture is perfectly faithful ; the writer, by a sincerity 
of retrospect, has avoided the temptation to read into 
the childish spirit the emotions of the expanding heart; 
it is all seen in the region of Maiden-sense, in the 
desirable clear light of the early morning, before the 
passionate impulses awake, before the intellect ex- 
pands. Thus the pure art of the conception lies in the 
picturiugthe perfect isolation of the childish soul, — not 
a normal soul, it must be remembered, — though per- 
haps the haunted emphasis of the style, its luxurious 
cadence, its mellowing of outline, may tend to disguise 
from us how real and lifelike indeed, how usual an 
experience, is being recorded. 

And for the style itself, it is a perfect example of a 
kind of poetical prose ; there is no involution, no intri- 
cacy. The language is perfectly simple ; and though 
some may feel a lusciousness, an over-ripeness of 
phrase, to predominate, yet the effect is perfectly 
deliberate, and it is by the intention that we must 
judge it. It may be set in a paradise of floating 
melodies in which the brisk, the joyful, the energetic 
may be loath to linger ; yet for all who love the half- 
lit regions of the spirit, the meditative charm of things, 
The Child in the House must remain one of the purest 
pieces of word-melody in the language, and one of the 
most delicate characterisations of a mood that comes 
to many and always with a secret and wistful charm. 

Before we speak of Metritis the Epicurean, which 
began to absorb Pater's energies from 1878 onwards, 
it will be as well to trace the slender thread of events. 
How uneventful his academical progress was may be 
augured from the fact that the year 1880 was in some 
ways almost the most momentous year of his life, 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 83 

because it was in the course of it that Pater deter- 
mined to resign the tutorship of the college. This step 
meant a serious loss of income j but he was now em- 
barked upon the task of constructing Marius, and could 
no longer disguise from himself the fact that writing 
was indubitably the most serious preoccupation of his 
life. He saw that it was becoming impossible for him 
to discharge the duties of the post adequately, and at 
the same time carry on his literary work effectively. 
The governing body of the college fully concurred in 
his decision ; and though the incident at first caused 
Pater some pain, realising, as he did, that the feeling of 
the society did not endorse his own theory of the func- 
tions of the tutorial office, yet he soon grew to perceive 
that his resignation had been a blessing in disguise : 
it freed him from work which was not particularly 
congenial, work which needed qualities, such as a brisk 
directness of address, a good-humoured strictness, a 
businesslike determination, which Pater had never even 
professed to possess. He continued to lecture ; but he 
was set free from the constant petty inroads on his time, 
to which a college tutor is always liable, and from per- 
petual small engagements and interruptions. It is a 
matter of regret that Pater did not realise this earlier. 
He would both have saved himself some chagrin, and 
he would have been able to give some of his best and 
most vigorous years to what was after all the real 
work of his life. There are, and always will be, abun- 
dance of effective college tutors who could not write 
Marias the Epicurean ; and, on the other hand, it is not 
an agreeable or dignified thing for a great man of 
letters, and a man, too, of a peculiarly sensitive tem- 
perament, to discover that he has been holding a post 
which has not been regarded as by any means appro- 
priate to his disposition, and that his discharge of its 



84 WALTER PATER [chap. 

duties, though at the cost of much patient effort and 
constant strain to himself, has not wholly satisfied 
his colleagues. 

On the other hand, lecturing was always a congenial 
task to Pater. He spent much time and thought upon 
his lectures, and prepared them with such thoroughness 
and care, that he tended to over-elaborate them, thus 
impairing their value as orally delivered discourses, 
intended for immediate comprehension. 

Mr. Humphry Ward writes : — 

" I became a Fellow of Brasenose early in 1869, and for the 
next three years saw Pater almost daily. The common stories 
of him, at Tutors' meetings, scholarship elections, etc., are not 
far from the truth. He saw that other people were better 
fitted than he to arrange details ; but he did the work assigned 
to him very well, and with much labour. The only time I re- 
member seeing him really angry was one night in Common 
Room when X., an elderly man and a former tutor, not over- 
burdened with ideals, made some cutting remark about the 
short hours and light work of modern lecturers. Pater, who 
had by that time had some five years' experience, and whose 
lectures (over the heads of most men) were crammed with 
thought and work, ' let himself go ' in a series of the most 
bitter repartees about the perfunctory stuff of the older time, 
the shams, conventions, and orthodox impostures of X. and 
his contemporaries. Relations between them were afterwards 
strained." 

In one college office, however, which Pater held until 
his death, he took great delight. The post of Dean is 
an almost honorary one, and the only official duty 
attached to it is that of presenting men for their 
degrees; but it gives the holder a dignified stall, that 
on the extreme right, on the decani side, next to the 
altar, a stall dignified by a special canopy and an 
exalted desk. Pater never failed to occupy his stall 
both on Sunday morning and evening ; and he was a 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 85 

strong advocate for the Sunday services being com- 
pulsory. He said with truth that there were many 
men who would be glad to have the habit of attending, 
but who would fail to attend, especially on Sunday 
mornings, partly from the attraction of breakfast 
parties, or possibly from pure indolence, unless there 
was a rule of attendance. As a matter of fact attend- 
ance was made a matter of individual taste, but 
Pater continued to deplore it. 

The service at Brasenose retains several peculiar 
little ceremonies ; the candles are lit at celebrations. 
The Junior Fellows bring in the elements with 
solemnity from the anti-chapel. When the procession 
leaves the altar, the dignitaries who carry the alms and 
the vessels bow at the lectern to the altar, and to the 
Principal as they pass his stall. The Vice-Principal 
bows to the altar on leaving his stall, and to the 
Principal as he passes out. These little observances, 
dating from Laudian, or even pre-Eeformation times, 
were very congenial to Pater; and it was always 
observed that though kneeling was painful to him, he 
always remained on his knees, in an attitude of deep 
reverence, during the whole administration of the 
Sacrament. Indeed his reverent and absorbed appear- 
ance in chapel will be long remembered by those to 
whom he was a familiar figure. His large pale face, his 
heavy moustache and firm chin, his stoop, his eyes 
cast down on his book in a veritable custoclia oculorum — 
all this was deeply impressive, and truly reflected the 
solemn preoccupation which he felt. It is characteristic 
of him that he used to regret that the ardour with 
which the undergraduates sang the Psalms abated in 
the Magnificat j which to him was the Song of Songs. 

One of the very few pieces of writing composed 
during the years devoted to Marius was the little 



86 WALTER PATER [chap. 

Essay on " Dante Gabriel Rossetti." This was written 
in 1883, not long after the poet's death, and is perhaps 
tinged with a memorial respect. Yet it is a subtle piece 
of praise, in which at the same time Pater seems deli- 
cately to weigh and test the author he is discussing ; 
but one cannot help feeling that the innermost world 
of mystical passion in which Rossetti lived was as a 
locked and darkened chamber to Pater. He can look 
into it, he can admire the accessories of the scene, he 
can analyse, he can even sympathise to a degree j but 
it was after all to Pater an unnatural region; the 
heated atmosphere of passion, the supreme significance 
of love, being foreign and almost antipathetic to Pater's 
serious and sober view of intellectual tranquillity. To 
be intellectually and perceptively impassioned indeed 
he desired ; but the physical ardours of love, the long- 
ing for enamoured possession — with this Pater had 
nothing in common. 

He divined the truth indeed by a sort of analogy of 
sympathy. 

" To Rossetti," he wrote, " life is a crisis at every moment. 
A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions 
of man's everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, 
gives a singular gravity to all his work : those matters never 
became trite to him." 

And again : — 

" For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each 
other, swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pic- 
torial genius, mainly by that so-called material loveliness, 
formed the great undeniable reality in things, the solid resist- 
ing substance, in a world where all beside might be but 
shadow. The fortunes of those affections — of the great love 
sodetermined ; itscasuistries,itslanguorsometimes; above all, 
its sorrows ; its fortunate or unfortunate collisions with those 
other great matters ; how it looks, as the long day of life goes 



in.] OXFORD LIFE 87 

round, in the light and shadow of them : all this, conceived 
with an abundant imagination, and a deep, a philosophic, 
reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse." 

This is ingenious enough, though it is hard to see 
exactly what Pater meant by the " casuistry," the 
" philosophical " vein of Eossetti. Eossetti rather 
seems to feel, to state the problem, with the solution 
of which philosophical minds might concern themselves. 
Thus he affords plentiful matter for philosophical 
speculation, but without philosophical intention ; and 
indeed the deep-seated impatience of Eossetti's nature 
had very little that was akin to the philosophical 
spirit. He felt the mystery, which is the basis of 
all philosophy, deeply ; but it was to him a baffling, 
a despairing mystery ; not an attractive mystery, 
supremely worth disentangling. 

And thus it is that Pater chooses as the typical in- 
stance of Eossetti's work the single composition which 
he says he would select if he had to name one to a 
reader desiring to make acquaintance with him for the 
first time — The King's Tragedy, & ballad which is hardly 
typical of Eossetti at all, a piece of somewhat languid 
unemotional workmanship ; with an excellence of its 
own indeed, but not even touched with the inner spirit 
of Eossetti's work. The reason of this is that Pater, 
admiring with a deep respect and regard the attitude 
of Eossetti to art, but yet not entering into his inner 
mood, found the restraint, the directness, the absence 
of exotic suggestiveness displayed in this poem more 
congenial to him ; and thus the essay remains rather a 
tour deforce than a sj^mpathetic appreciation ; he was 
surveying Eossetti from the outside, not, as in the 
writers whom he himself selected to deal with, from 
the inside. Pater in his critical work bears always, 
like the angel of the Eevelation, a golden reed to 



88 WALTER PATER [chap. hi. 

measure the city ; but in this particular essay it is a 
piece of measuring and no more ; and nothing could 
more clearly show the impersonal, the intellectual trend 
of Pater's temperament than his comparative failure to 
accompany Eossetti into the penetralia of his beauty- 
haunted and beauty -tortured spirit. 



CHAPTER IV 

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 

When or how Pater began to form the design of 
Marias the Epicurean is not known. I cannot help 
doubting whether it was at first intended to be so large 
a work. His method of working was so elaborate, so 
deliberate, that he preferred shorter studies, episodes 
rather than continuous narrative. The year 1878 had 
been a more or less busy year. The Child in the House 
had appeared, and he had written three other studies ; 
but he fell into a long silence. In 1879 nothing appeared 
from his pen. In 1880 two short Greek Studies were 
all that he published ; in 1881 and 1882 he published 
nothing ; in 1883 came the little study of Rossetti, pub- 
lished as an introduction in Ward's English Poets. In 
1884 he published nothing; and at last in 1885 ap- 
peared Marius the Epicurean. It may be said that he 
gave up six years of his life, when his mental powers 
were at their strongest, to the preparation of this great 
book. He felt the strain imposed upon him by the size 
of the conception very severely ; moreover, he realised 
that to execute a subject on so large a scale was 
not wholly consonant with the bent of his mind; 
thus he wrote to Miss Paget (Vernon Lee) in July 
1883 : — 

" I have hopes of completing one half of my present chief 
work — an Imaginary Portrait of a peculiar type of mind in the 

89 



90 WALTER PATER [chap. 

time of Marcus Aurelius, by the end of this vacation. . . . 
I am wishing to get the whole completed, as I have visions of 
many smaller pieces of work, the composition of which would 
be actually pleasanter to me. However, I regard this present 
matter as a sort of duty. For you know I think that there is 
a . . . sort of religious phase possible for the modern mind, 
the conditions of which phase it is the main object of my 
design to convey." 

So few personal hints are preserved of Pater's feelings 
about any of his works that this statement, made in 
the very throes of his labour, has a peculiar interest. 

The motive of Marius is the tracing of the history 
of a highly intellectual nature, with a deep religious 
bias, through various stages of philosophy to the 
threshold of Christianity; for it is impossible to 
resist the conviction that Marius, dying technically 
a Christian, his last moments soothed with Chris- 
tian rites, would, if the creator of the book had de- 
cided to prolong his progress, have become a professed 
Christian. 

Before we examine the book in detail we may briefly 
indicate the stages through which Marius passes. The 
first part traces his boyhood and school life, and 
shows him, so to speak, in the orthodox stage, accept- 
ing without question and with deep devotion the old 
native religion of his land ; in his school days comes the 
mental awakening, and the birth of philosophical specu- 
lation. In the second part Marius takes his bear- 
ings, and becomes an intellectual Epicurean, of the 
Cyrenaic school. He goes to Rome, and joins the 
Imperial household as secretary to the Emperor Aure- 
lius ; and thus the Stoic position is brought before him 
in its most attractive form. In the third part Marius 
learns the inadequacy of his Cyrenaic philosophy, and 
begins to see that there is an isolation and a lack of 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 91 

sympathy in his position. He feels, too, the incom- 
pleteness of the Stoical system ; and realises the need 
of a vital faith in some unseen and guiding power to 
preserve the serenity of mind which he desires. At 
the end of this part Marius is a Theist ; at this point 
some unrecorded years are supposed to elapse. In 
the fourth part Marius is brought into direct contact 
with Christianity, but the appeal that it makes to him 
is mainly aesthetic ; yet the faith in an unseen power 
comes nearer as the shadow of death begins to fall. 

The background, carefully selected by Pater for the 
story to enact itself in, is the time of the Emperor 
Marcus Aurelius, a skilfully chosen period, when philo- 
sophy was fashionable, and when a liberal toleration 
was extended to Christianity ; so that the development 
of Marius' philosophical and religious position takes 
place equably and naturally, without the severe strain 
which a period of barbarism or persecution might have 
put upon it. 

It may also be observed that the story, though in a 
sense romantic, is free from emotional incidents. Two 
friendships play their part in the development of 
Marius ; but there is no hint from first to last of the 
distracting emotion of love. With the exception of 
the faint picture of his mother in the opening of the 
book, transitory glimpses of the Empress Faustina and 
of the Christian widow Cecilia, there is an entire 
absence of the feminine element. 

The book bears from first to last a strong personal, 
almost autobiographical, impress ; but at the same time 
it may be said that it is essentially a learned book ; the 
local colour, the archaeological element, is very closely 
studied, and used, as was ever Pater's way, in no 
pedantic fashion, but fused with a perfect naturalism 
into the story. It is probably, however, true to say 



92 WALTER PATER [chap. 

that the fact that Pater's knowledge of Italy was to a 
great extent superficial helped him to make his picture 
so clear and vivid ; he was always at his best when he 
was amplifying slender hints and recollected glimpses. 
Too great a wealth of detailed materials tended, as we 
shall have occasion to observe in a later book, Gaston 
de Latour, to blur the sharp outline and to interfere 
with lucid execution. 

The workmanship of the book is from first to last 
perfect; if there is a fault, and it may be fairly 
reckoned a fault, it lies in the introduction of certain 
rather over-lengthy episodes of translated or adapted 
passages, such as the story of Cupid and Psyche out 
of the Golden Book of Apuleius, the discourses of the 
Emperor Aurelius, and the conversation between 
Lucian and Hermotimus in the fourth part. In 
themselves they are models of literary grace ; but 
in a connected narrative they are rather as wide 
trenches dug across the reader's path. They are feli- 
citous indeed, and in a sense apposite ; but just as in 
the Arabian Nights the device of story within story, 
like those nests of enamelled Indian boxes, causes a 
reluctant suspension of thought, so it may be said in 
Marius that the holding up of the main interest by the 
introduction of pieces of work on so minute a scale is 
not justified. It is as though pilgrims on a river, who 
desire above all things to complete their journey, 
should be compelled to traverse and explore a back- 
water, where no amount of beautiful detail reconciles 
them to the temporary abandonment of their original 
quest. 

The art of the writer is perhaps most manifest 
in the first part, in which there is a delighted, a 
luxurious zest, hardly maintained in the same even- 
ness throughout. Indeed, in spite of the size of the 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 93 

whole conception, and the perfect craftsmanship dis- 
played, one is tempted to believe that Pater's real 
strength was the strength of the essayist rather than of 
the narrator ; a belief in which, as we have seen, he 
himself concurred. 

In the first part is brought out with exquisite grace 
the life of the old Koman villa, buried in the remote 
countryside, near the sea: the name of the place is 
White-nights (Ad Vigilias Albas). It is half-farm, half- 
villa ; here the lonely boy grows up, with his widowed 
mother, whose life is but a life of shadowy sentiment 
consecrated to the memory of the dead. 

" The little glazed windows in the uppermost chamber 
framed each its dainty landscape — the pallid crags of Car- 
rara, like wildly twisted snow-drifts above the purple heath ; 
the distant harbour with its freight of white marble going to 
sea ; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its dark head- 
land, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers. . . . The 
air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent of 
the new-mown hay along all the passages of the house." 

There is a beautiful passage about the boy's simple 
pursuits : — 

" The ramble to the coast, over the marsh with its dwarf 
roses and wild lavender, and delightful signs, one after an- 
other — the abandoned boat, the ruined flood-gates, the flock 
of wild birds — that one was approaching the sea; the long 
summer-day of idleness among its vague scents and sounds." 

The house itself has the perfect Italian charm : — 

" Lying away from the white road, at the point where it 
began to decline somewhat steeply to the marsh-land below. 
The building of pale red and yellow marble, mellowed by 
age . . . beyond the gates, was indeed but the exquisite 
fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Two centuries 
of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses 



94 WALTER PATER [chap. 

which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and 
there the marble plates had slipped from their places, where 
the delicate weeds had forced their way." 

The boy grows up in an intense meditative cloistered 
mood, with a scrupulous conscience carefully fostered 
by his mother. "A white bird, she told him once, 
looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry- 
in his bosom across a crowded public place — his 
own soul was like that ! " There is a traditional, in- 
herited priesthood in the family, and the boy has a 
deep liturgical and ritual preoccupation ; he is happi- 
est in sacred places, and is conscious all his life, 
even in the midst of worldly distractions, of " a sort 
of hieratic beauty and order in the conduct of life." 
Perhaps it may be said that the ritual element, the 
pleasure in processions, and ordered hymns, and cere- 
monies and symbols is a little over-weighted. There is 
a sense of unreality, a lack of lifelikeness, about the 
dramatic intentness with which the functions described 
are carried out; the devout temper of the central 
figure, of Marius himself, is too definitely presupposed 
in the worshippers. We shall have occasion to advert 
to this point again ; but in this first part the spectacle 
of the religious ceremonies so tenderly and quaintly 
described gives one the feeling that one is watching 
the movements of the well-drilled supers of a play, 
rather than the unconstrained movement of actual 
life. 

The boy's religious sense is deepened by a visit that 
he pays, for the sake of curing a boyish ailment, to a 
neighbouring temple of Aesculapius, where he listens to 
the mystical discourse of a young priest. He is shown 
through a sliding panel a retired long-drawn valley, lit 
with sunlight and closed by a misty mountain, which 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 95 

gives him a strong sense of the unsuspected presence 
of the unseen in life. His mother dies ; and he him- 
self goes to Pisa to school, where he lives a somewhat 
isolated life, with dreams of literary fame. 

" While all the heart (of his fellow-scholars) was in their 
limited boyish race, and its transitory prizes, he was already 
entertaining himself, very pleasnrably meditative, with the 
tiny drama in action before him, as but the mimic, prelimi- 
nary exercise for a larger contest, and already with an im- 
plicit epicureanism." 

His view of life is coloured by an intense boyish 
attachment to a school friend Flavian, a wayward, self- 
absorbed, brilliant boy, with a strong taste for euphu- 
istic literature, and of sceptical tendency. Flavian's 
life is already tainted by sensuality : " How often, after- 
wards, did evil things present themselves in malign 
association with the memory of that beautiful head, 
and with a kind of borrowed sanction and charm in 
its natural grace ! " But Marius by a certain coldness 
and fastidiousness of temperament preserves his purity 
untouched. And Marius here learns his first lessons in 
Epicureanism of the higher kind. " He was acquiring 
what it is the chief function of all higher education to 
impart, the art, namely, of so relieving the ideal or 
poetic traits, the elements of distinction, in our every- 
day life — of so exclusively living in them — that the un- 
adorned remainder of it, the mere drift or debris of our 
days, comes to be as though it were not." But it was 
not the prescribed studies of the school that gave him 
his hints of beauty. " If our modern education, in its 
better efforts, really conveys to any of us that kind of 
idealising power, it does so (though dealing mainly, 
as its professed instruments, with the most select and 
ideal remains of ancient literature) oftenest by truant 



96 WALTER PATER [chap. 

reading; and thus it happened also, long ago, with 
Marius and his friend." 

Then comes Marius' literary training in association 
with Flavian. He learns to appreciate the delicate 
manipulation of words, the sharp impression, the exclu- 
sion of all " that was but middling, tame, or only half- 
true," the refinement of what is already refined, the 
fastidious correctness of form, the principle that 
" to know when one's self is interested, is the first 
condition of interesting other people." And this 
brings Marius to the knowledge of the necessity of 
scrupulous independence in literary taste. 

" It was a principle, the forcible apprehension of which 
made him jealous and fastidious in the selection of his in- 
tellectual food ; often listless while others read or gazed 
diligently; never pretending to be moved out of mere com- 
plaisance to other people's emotions : it served to foster in 
him a very scrupulous literary sincerity with himself. And 
it was this uncompromising demand for a matter, in all 
art, derived immediately from lively personal intuition, this 
constant appeal to individual judgment, which saved his 
euphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere 
artifice." 

Then comes the sudden death of Flavian, in a fever ; 
and his end is told with apathetic intensity which makes 
it one of the strongest passages in the book. Flavian 
is writing a poem, and struggles to continue his work 
through the slow progress of decay. In this beautiful 
passage one entirely false note is struck ; and it has a 
special interest because it is the only moment at which 
the narrative form is interrupted for a moment by the 
dramatic. Marius lies down beside his dying friend, 
heedless of possible contagion, to try and communicate 
some warmth to the shivering frame. In the morning 
Flavian's delirious anguish ceases with a revival of 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 97 

mental clearness. " ' Is it a comfort,' Marius whispered 
then, ' that I shall often come and weep over you ? ' — 
'Not unless I be aware, and hear you weeping V n It 
is certain that this effort to sum up a thought, which 
might have been present in Marius' mind, in definite 
words is an artistic mistake. If any confession of the 
terrible consciousness that death was at hand was to 
be made, it was for Flavian to confess it ; and Flavian's 
own answer is equally untrue to nature. 

And so with the death of Flavian the first part closes 
in desolation. 

The death of his friend is the event which, at the 
beginning of the second part, flings Marius into philo- 
sophical speculation. "To Marius . . . the earthly 
end of Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing 
less than the soul's extinction. Flavian had gone out 
as utterly as the fire among those still beloved ashes." 
Thus he is confronted in the sternest and saddest way 
with the mystery of death : and the thought comes 
home to him that he must at all costs realise the 
significance of life, and how he must play his part 
in the days that remain before he too passes into 
shadow and silence; the religion of his childhood 
deserts him ; and he is forced to turn to the 
"honest action of his own untroubled, unassisted 
intelligence." 

He secluded himself in a severe intellectual medita- 
tion, becoming something of a mystery to his fellows. 
He was reading, "for the most part, those writers 
chiefly who had made it their business to know what 
might be thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, 
personal essence, which had seemed to go out altogether, 
along with the funeral fires." He studies Heraclitus, 
and learns to mistrust habitual impressions and un- 
corrected sensation, and to discern the movement in 



98 WALTER PATER [chap. 

things of " the sleepless, ever-sustained, inexhaustible 
energy of the divine reason." He accepts the canon 
that the individual must be to himself the measure of 
all things, and resolves to limit his researches to what 
immediately interests him, resting peacefully in a pro- 
found ignorance of all beside. " He would entertain 
no theory of conduct which did not allow its due 
weight to this primary element of incertitude or nega- 
tion, in the conditions of man's life." And here he fell 
under the dominion of Aristippus of Cyrene, who was 
the first to translate the abstractions of metaphysics 
into a practical sentiment. He, too, was more than half 
an agnostic ; but instead of his agnosticism leading to 
a languid enervation, it led rather to a perpetual and 
inextinguishable thirst for experience. 

" What Marius saw in him was the spectacle of one of the 
happiest temperaments coming, so to speak, to an understand- 
ing with the most depressing of theories " ; and the practical 
conclusion he arrived at was that self-culture was probably 
the best solution, the impulse to "adorn and beautify, in 
scrupulous self-respect, our souls, and whatever our souls touch 
upon — these wonderful bodies, these material dwelling-places 
through which the shadows pass together for a while, the very 
raiment we wear, our very pastimes and the intercourse of 
society." 

Aristippus, indeed, became to Marius a master of 
decorous and high-minded living. Metaphysic, as 
described by Michelet, " the art of bewildering oneself 
methodically," he must spend little time upon that. 
" Not pleasure, but a general completeness of life, was 
the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysical meta- 
physic really pointed," and to acquire this, to regard 
life as the end of life, the only way was through "in- 
sight, through culture, into all that the present moment 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 99 

holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its 
presence." 

The pursuit of vivid sensations and intellectual 
apprehensions must be his work, until such a manner 
of life, by its effort to live days " lovely and pleasant," 
might become a kind of hidden mystic religion. But 
there was no touch of hedonism in this : — 

"Not pleasure, but fulness of life, and ' insight' as conduct- 
ing to that fulness — energy, variety, and choice of experience, 
including noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in 
the exquisite old story of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms 
of the moral life . . . whatever form of human life, in short, 
might be heroic, impassioned, ideal : from these the ' new 
Cyrenaicism ' of Marius took its criterion of values." 

This would involve " a life of industry, of indus- 
trious study, only possible through healthy rule, 
keeping clear the eye alike of body and soul." 

Marius then, with his creed formulated, at nineteen 
years of age, sets out for Rome, where he has an old 
family mansion, to become the amanuensis of the 
Emperor. There is a beautiful description of his 
journey: how the sun went down "though there was 
still a glow along the road through the shorn cornfields, 
and the birds were still awake about the crumbling 
gray heights of an old temple." 

On the journey he meets the young Christian 
knight, Cornelius. And it must be here confessed 
that the youthful soldier of the Imperial guard, with 
his gilded armour, his blithe manliness, his sense 
of secret serenity, is one of the least convincing 
figures of the book. To put it in the plainest way 
possible, there is an indefinable taint of priggishness 
about Cornelius, and Pater in vain labours to create a 
charm about him. To weave such a charm the elaborate 

Lore. 



100 WALTER PATER [chap. 

narrative style is inadequate; one gets no glimpse 
into the blithe and serene mind of Cornelins ; he is 
" faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null" — no 
touch of humanity ever comes to relieve his statuesque 
pose, and one wearies of his golden armour and his 
handsome face. Nothing but dramatic art, such as the 
art of Scott, could have given Cornelius attractiveness ; 
and even he would have been baffled by the sober per- 
fection of the young knight. One longs that he should 
lose his temper, make some human mistake, exhibit 
some trace of emotion or even frailty ; but he takes 
instead his icy shining way through the story, and the 
heart never desires to follow him. 

Then comes Marius' first sight of Eome, his realisa- 
tion of the fact that it was, beside being a city of palaces, 
become the romantic home of the most restless religious 
instinct, of the wildest superstition. Religions were 
draining into Rome, as the rivers into the sea. In the 
midst moved the stately figure of the Stoic Emperor, 
whom Marius first sees in a religious procession, and 
whose calm face, with its prominent eyes demurely 
downcast, but yet " broadly and benignantly observant," 
candid gaze, and ascetic air, as though " the flesh had 
scarcely been an equal gainer with the spirit," im- 
pressed him profoundly. With him walked the 
goodly, comely, sensual Lucius Verus, the other 
Augustus, with his "strange capacity for misusing 
the adornments of life, with a masterly grace." Then 
follows the Emperor's discourse on the Vanity of 
Human Ambitions, delivered in the Senate, a skilful 
cento of aphorisms taken from the Meditations, and 
finally Marius' introduction to the Imperial house- 
hold, his sight of Faustina the Empress, Fronto the 
philosopher, and the Emperor himself. He sees, 
too, a gladiatorial show, at which the Emperor sits 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 101 

impassibly, writing and reading, and wonders at the 
tolerance, " which seemed to Marius to mark Aurelius 
as his inferior now and for ever on the question of 
righteousness ; to set them on opposite sides, in some 
great conflict." 

It may be freely confessed that Pater does con- 
trive, by pathetic and emotional touches, to bring out 
with wonderful vividness the human charm of the 
Emperor, his deep patience, his fatigue, his affection- 
ateness, his devotion to duty. He and Flavian remain 
as the two vital figures of the book, apart from the 
hero himself; and it may be held a true triumph of a 
species of historical art to have evolved so real, so 
dignified, so intensely vivid a figure out of the some- 
what chilly abstractedness that had hitherto sur- 
rounded the philosophic Lord of legions, the Stoic 
master of the world. 

In the third part of Marius, which is much shorter 
than any of the other parts, the revelation grows 
more distinct. Marius, overcome with doubt as to 
whether his new intellectual scheme can be harmonised 
with the old serious morality of his childhood, hears 
a discourse by Fronto on the question of morals. 

" He supposed his hearer to be, with all sincerity, in search 
after some principle of conduct (and it was here that he 
seemed to Marius to be speaking straight to him) which might 
give unity of motive to an actual rectitude, a cleanness and 
probity of life, determined partly by natural affection, partly 
by enlightened self-interest or the feeling of honour, due in 
part even to the m^re fear of penalties. . . . How tenderly — 
more tenderly thin many stricter souls — he might yield him- 
self to kindly instinct ! What fineness of charity in passing 
judgment on others ! What an exquisite conscience of other 
men's susceptibilities! He knows for how much the man- 
ner, because the heart itself, counts, in doing a kindness. He 
goes beyond most people in his care for all weakly creatures ; 



102 WALTER PATER [chap. 

judging, instinctively, that to be but sentient is to possess 
rights. He conceives a hundred duties, though he may not 
call them by that name, of the existence of which purely 
duteous souls may have no suspicion. He has a kind of pride 
in doing more than they, in a way of his own." 

And then the orator proceeds to sketch a kind of 
universal commonwealth, a heavenly citizenship, in 
which all men should realise their position, their duty ; 
and Marius falls to wondering whether there could be 
any such inner community of humanity, wider than 
even the community of nationality, and with a larger 
patriotism, with an aristocracy of elect spirits, an 
ever-widening example, and a comely order of its own. 
He realises that his Cyrenaicism is after all but an 
enthusiasm characteristic of youth, almost a fanaticism, 
and that' something wider, larger, more impersonal is 
needed, as life goes on. He realised that in his first 
philosophy there had been " some cramping, narrowing, 
costly preference of one part of his own nature," and 
that he had paid a great p>rice " in the sacrifice of a 
thousand possible sympathies " for the intense personal 
appreciation of the beauty of the moment. It was a 
narrow perfection that he had been aiming at after all, 
the perfection of "capacities of feeling, of exquisite 
physical impressions, of an imaginative sympathy." 
But he had rejected the wider, the more venerable 
system of religious sentiments and ideas, which had 
grown up in the vast field of human experience. And 
thus he saw that he could not stay where he was ; that 
he must recognise not only his own personal point of 
view, but the wider community of humanity. 

In this frame of mind Marius has a memorable inter- 
view with the Emperor, who, in order to raise funds 
for the war, has determined to sell by public auction 
the accumulated treasures of the Imperial palace, and 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 103 

is feeling with an austere joy the pleasure of a deep 
philosophical detachment from the world. Marius 
sees that this kind of renunciation, a renunciation of 
the very things of the purest quality of beauty that 
his philosophy had taught him to value, may bring 
with it a loftier and simpler kind of joy than even the 
sober and refined enjoyment of them. Aurelius, with 
a supreme sense of duty, is about to plunge into the 
uncongenial labours of a great campaign, and Marius 
sees that in the selfless surrender to what appears the 
Divine will lay his true generosity of soul. He sees 
that one of the strongest features of the Emperor's 
character is the union of intellectual independence 
with a tender sympathy for all the manifestations of 
the popular religious sense, realising, as he does, that 
men must reach their ideal by very different paths. 
Marius finds, among the Emperor's papers committed 
to him, a document, a species of diary, full of the most 
intimate self-communings. And in spite of the mag- 
nificence of character, the resolute determination, the 
amazing generosity there revealed, there is a note of 
heaviness. He sees how " the forced and yet facile 
optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere, might lack, 
after all, the secret of genuine cheerfulness. It left 
in truth a weight upon the spirits; and with that 
weight unlifted, there could be no real justification 
of the ways of Heaven to man." The cheerfulness 
of demeanour, indeed, to which the Emperor had 
attained, -was not a spontaneous joy breaking out 
from an inner source of happy faith, but a practised, 
a deliberate attitude, attained by a rigorous self- 
restraint. Marius thinks of Cornelius, whose cheer- 
fulness seems of a totally different kind, " united with 
the bold recognition of evil as a fact in the world," 
yet he sees or suspects in Cornelius an irrepressible 



104 WALTER PATER [chap. 

and impassioned hopefulness. He finds it necessary 
to go to Praeneste, where the Emperor is staying for 
a few days with his younger children, and arrives to 
find the little Annius Verus dying; and here comes 
one of the beautiful touches through which one comes 
so close to the humanity of Aurelius : — 

" He saw the emperor carry the child away — quite conscious 
at last, but with a touching expression ... of weakness and 
defeat — pressed close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then 
for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, 
in its obscure distress." 

And so the Emperor sets out on the campaign from 
which he has reason to think that he may never return. 
The pageantry of his departure, the magnificent armour 
that he wears, are in strange contrast to the face of 
Aurelius, " with its habitually dejected hue grown 
now to an expression of positive suffering." He de- 
parts, and Marius returns to his musings; but in a 
lonely ride into the Sabine Hills he has a strange up- 
lifting of spirit, in which he feels that behind all the 
complexity of life, " behind the veil of a mechanical and 
material order, but only just behind it," there moves 
a guide, a heavenly friend, ever at his side, to whom 
he is perhaps dearer than even to himself, a Father 
of Men. 

Marius felt that after the realisation of this possi- 
bility, his life could never be quite the same again, 
and that only in the light of this hope could he appre- 
hend the secret of the lonely pilgrimage upon which 
he seemed to be bound. 

Some time is now supposed to elapse, and in the 
fourth part Marius comes upon the scene again at a 
banquet at which the young Commodus is present, 
and also the great Apuleius, with whom Marius has 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 105 

a few moments of private conversation. Apuleius un- 
folds to his companion his belief in a kind of middle 
order of beings, between man and God, by whom the 
prayers and aspirations of humanity can be carried 
and interpreted to God. It is, indeed, the doctrine 
of the ministry of angels which is thus foreshadowed ; 
and the effect on Marius is to give a heightened sense 
of unreality to the world in which he moves ; and it 
is at this juncture that he visits with Cornelius the 
villa of Cecilia, and is deeply impressed with the 
order, the industry, the joyful peace of the household. 
Cornelius takes his friend through a garden and into 
the old catacomb of the Cecilii, where Marius sees the 
graves of Christians, and reads with a strange thrill 
of spirit the touching and inspiring inscriptions on 
their tombs, that seem to exorcise the terrors of death 
by a serene and lively hope. The fresh and cool 
sensation of peace with which the whole surroundings 
are invested is to Marius like a window opened 
from a hot and fragrant room into the dawn of some 
other moruing. Here, he fancied, might be the cure, 
the anodyne for the deep sorrowfulness of spirit under 
which he seemed to have been always labouring. He 
began to discern the source of that untroubled serenity, 
that quiet happiness of which he had always been 
conscious in his friend. The Christian ideal of that 
period, during the peace of the Antonines, had lent 
itself to the harmonious development of human nature, 
in a due proportion, rather than to the idea of ascetic 
self-sacrifice ; and the divine urbanity and moderation 
of this secluded household exercised a strong spell 
over the sensuous temperament of Marius. 

But here there creeps in the intense liturgical and 
ritual preoccupation of the author. Marius goes to 
find Cornelius at the Cecilian villa, and becomes by 



106 WALTER PATER [chap. 

accident the spectator of a solemn celebration of the 
Eucharistic mystery. 

The description of the service is exquisitely, almost 
lusciously rendered ; it satisfies Marius' deep instinct 
for worship to the uttermost. But here the reader 
cannot help feeling a lack of proportion ; the sensuous 
element triumphs over the intellectual. The choir of 
children, the white-robed youths, the bishop himself, 
" moving the hands which seemed endowed in very 
deed with some mysterious power ... or chanting 
in cadence of a grave sweetness the leading parts of 
the rite," have a certain unreality about them, an 
impossible peace, an almost mawkishness of conception. 
It seems, perhaps, a hard and unsympathic criticism 
to make of a passage into which so much tender 
idealism has passed, but there is a taint as of the 
Sunday-school type about the incident, which not 
even its elaborate art can surmount. One feels in a 
false atmosphere, an atmosphere which is not only 
unrealisable but actually undesirable. It lacks the 
salt of humanity, and is touched with the unalloyed 
meekness which the manly heart, however tender, 
however responsive, does not really wish to enforce. 
The narrative then passes with a singular abruptness 
back to Marius' literary preoccupations ; and the in- 
trusion of this chapter at this point may be held to 
be one of the few artistic mistakes of the book. It 
interrupts the progress, as if by a whimsical diversion, 
at a crucial point ; it introduces the figure of the 
satirist Lucian, and relates a conversation with Her- 
motimus, a beautiful thing in itself, but with no real 
bearing on the development of the central theme. 
The upshot of the talk, which is in itself a delicious 
Platonic dialogue, full of humour and fancy, is that 
there is no certain criterion of philosophical ideas, but 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 107 

that the adoption of any form of philosophical belief 
is dictated by a preference and an instinct in the 
disciple ; Lucian, employing a species of Socratic 
questioning, extinguishes, by a sort of affectionate 
and tender scepticism, the burning enthusiasm of the 
boy's ardent philosophy. The real gist of the chapter 
lies in the sight which Marius has as he returns to 
Rome of a wayside crucifix ; and the echoes of the 
conversation take shape in his mind, making him 
reflect whether it were possible that Love "in the 
greatness of his strength " could condescend to sustain 
Love " fainting by the road." It is just a hint, like a 
ray of light through a half-opened door. 

There follow passages of a diary of Marius with 
many vignettes of small sorrowful and loving things ; 
a racehorse led to death, a crippled child at play with 
his sister, a boy, the son of a labourer, waiting with his 
father's dinner, and gazing " with a sorrowful distaste 
for the din and dirt" at the brick-kiln where his 
father is at work. The motif of the chapter is that 
an enlarged charity, a passionate sympathy with 
humanity, so apt to be excluded by a philosophical 
system, contains perhaps a truer estimate of the secret 
of life. 

" A protest comes, out of the very depths of man's radically 
hopeless condition in the world. . . . Dared one hope that 
there is a heart, even as ours ... a heart even as mine, behind 
this vain show of things ! " 

And now again Marius goes to the house of Cecilia, 
and sees the burial of a child ; he notes that not even 
the intensity of human grief which the household feels 
and manifests in its stifled sobbing, its unrestrained 
tears, can do away with " the habitual gleam of joy, the 
placid satisfaction " of spirit. At the service is read 



108 WALTER PATER [chap. 

aloud an epistle speaking of martyrdoms in Gaul, of 
Blandina and Ponticus, bringing to Marius the sense 
of the " strange new heroism/' uplifting sorrow out 
of the region of " private regret," which seems to be 
appearing in the world. 

Marius sees the return of the Emperor in triumph ; 
and he is filled with a sense of sickening reaction at the 
sight of the captives in the procession, and at the fact 
that one of so lofty a spirit as the Emperor can fall so 
low as to take his place in the midst of so barbarous a 
ceremony. " Aurelius himself seemed to have under- 
gone the world's coinage, and fallen to the level of his 
reward, in a mediocrity no longer golden." And thus 
at that moment the vital failure of the philosophical 
attitude reveals itself to Marius ; he sets out to revisit 
his old home, with a shadow of approaching disaster 
upon him. He opens the old mausoleum of the 
house, and the thought that he may be the last of 
his race, blending with a passionate tenderness for 
the past, his father, his ancestry, induces him to 
bury all the remains of the dead deep below the 
ground. 

" He himself watched the work, early and late ; coming on the 
last day very early, and anticipating, by stealth, the last 
touches, while the workmen were absent ; one young lad 
only, finally smoothing down the earthy bed, greatly sur- 
prised at the seriousness with which Marius flung in his 
flowers, one by one, to mingle with the dark mould." 

And now the end comes with a certain unexpectedness. 
Marius, reflecting on his own life, sees that though with 
a natural bent for adventure and action, all his progress 
has been inward and meditative, always aiming at 
detachment rather than at the intermingling of himself 
with the current. 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 109 

The death that follows was no doubt designed by 
the author to have something tragic and what may be 
called almost sensational about it, to relieve by contrast 
the contemplative texture of the work. Cornelius finds 
Marius in depression and weariness at White-nights, 
and contrasting sadly his own languor of spirit with 
the irrepressible youth of the other. 

They set off for Eome. The plague is ravaging the 
land, and this, together with a shock of earthquake, 
loosens the superstitions of the natives ; an attack is 
made on a body of Christians who are praying by the 
grave of the martyr Hyacinthus. Blood is shed, and 
the group, including Cornelius and Marius, are arrested 
and sent for trial to the chief town of the district. 
Marius, in obedience to a sudden instinct, procures the 
liberation of Cornelius by bribing the guards, explain- 
ing to Cornelius that he is allowed to depart to procure 
the means of legal defence. The first feeling of Marius 
as he sees Cornelius depart is a kind of innocent pride 
that he, who had always believed himself to lack the 
heroic temper, could thus display a sudden courage. 
But a mood of dark melancholy follows ; he foresees 
that he will suffer the death of a common felon, with- 
out even the Christian consolation of the martyr's 
example. The hardships of the march bring on a 
fever, and Marius is abandoned by the guard as a 
dying man in a little hill village. At first the rest 
and quiet relieve his tortured mind, and he is filled 
with a sense of gratitude to the unseen Friend who has 
guarded him through his long journey, and draws near 
in faith to the crucified Jesus. In this half-peaceful 
mood he finds himself able to think of death with an 
intense and reverent curiosity, as of a door through 
which he must pass to his further pilgrimage. And 
then the weariness comes back tenfold as death draws 



110 WALTER PATER [chap. 

near ; the Christians of the place surround his bed, and 
hearing of the deed he has done in saving Cornelius, 
administer the last rites, the consecrated bread, the holy 
oil ; and when all is over bury him with the accustomed 
prayers, and with an added joy, holding him to have 
been a martyr indeed. 

Such is the progress of this melancholy and medita- 
tive soul, to whom even youth had hardly been a 
season of joy, so oppressed was it by the sad malady 
of thought. 

It is difficult to treat so intimate a memorial of a 
personality in a critical spirit ; and we may say at once 
that to deal with a book that is so sacred a document 
in the spirit of finding fault with it for not being other 
than it is, is wholly out of place. It may be said to 
have nothing heroic about it, but to be almost purely 
spectatorial. It may be easily labelled introspective, 
even morbid; but it is of the very essence of the book 
that it is designed to trace the story of a soul to which 
the ordinary sources of happiness are denied, and to 
which, from temperament and instinct, the whole of 
life is a species of struggle, an attempt to gain serenity 
and liberty by facing the darkest problems candidly 
and courageously, rather than by trying to drown the 
mournful questionings of the mind in the tide of life 
and activity. What we have to do is, granted the 
type and the conception, to see how near the execution 
comes to the idea which inspired it. 

It will be seen that the book is to a certain extent the 
history of a noble failure ; Marius' attempt to arrive, 
by his own unassisted strength, by a firm and candid 
judgment, at a solution for life, breaks down at every 
point. He falls back in a kind of weariness upon the 
old religious intuitions that had been his joy in boy- 
hood. He learns that not in isolation, not in self- 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 111 

sufficiency, does the soul draw near to the apprehension 
of the truth, but in enlarged sympathy, in the sense of 
comradeship, in the perhaps anthropomorphic instinct 
of the Fatherhood, the brotherhood of God. It is a 
passionate protest not only against materialism, but 
against the intellectual ideal too ; it is a no less passion- 
ate pronouncement of the demand of the individual to 
be satisfied and convinced, within his brief span of life, 
of the truth that he desires and needs. 

But the weakness of the case is, that instead of 
emphasising the power of sympathy, the Christian 
conception of Love, which differentiates Christianity 
from all other religious systems, Marius is after all 
converted, or brought near to the threshold of the 
faith, more by its sensuous appeal, its liturgical 
solemnities ; the element, that is to say, which Chris- 
tianity has in common with all religions, and which is 
essentially human in character. And more than that, 
even the very peace which Marius discerns in Chris- 
tianity is the old philosophical peace over again. 
What attracts Marius in the Christian spirit is its 
serenity and its detachment, not its vision of the 
corporateness of humanity and the supreme tie of 
perfect love. This element is introduced, indeed, but 
fitfully, and as if by a sense of historical fidelity, 
rather than from any personal conviction of its 
supreme vitality. With all its candid effort the spirit 
of the writer could not disentangle itself from the 
sense of personal isolation, of personal independence ; 
there is no sense of union with God : the soul and its 
creator, however near they draw in a species of divine 
sympathy, are always treated of as severely apart and 
separate. The mystical union of the personality with 
God is outside the writer's ken ; the obedience of the 
human will to the divine, rather than the identification 



112 WALTER PATER [chap. 

of the two, is the end to which he moves ; and this 
perhaps accounts for the drawing of the line at the 
point which leaves Marius still outside the fold, be- 
cause one feels that the author himself hardly dared 
to attempt to put into words what lay inside. 

And now, as our chief concern is with the literary 
art of the book, we may turn to consider its main 
characteristics. 

" Though the manner of his work," says Pater, speaking 
of Marius, " was changed formally from poetry to prose, he 
remained, and must always be, of the poetic temper : by 
which, I mean, among other things, that quite independently 
of the general habit of that pensive age he lived much, and as 
it were by system, in reminiscence." 

This is true of the book itself : we cannot say that 
it is all reminiscence, but it is all bound up with 
reminiscence. The author makes little attempt to 
deal with the fresh atmosphere, the sharp detail of the 
present ; still less to throw himself forward into the 
glowing idealization of the future ; the whole book is 
that of a man looking back, the outlines of what he 
sees all mellowed and rounded in a sort of golden haze 
of pensive light. And it is thus essentially poetical. 
The carefully studied archaeology of the book is never 
insisted upon, but only used as contributing a pictur- 
esque and hinted background ; but it is poetical in the 
sense that there is no attempt at definite or scientific 
statement — even the abstrusest doctrines of philo- 
sophy, as well as the intricate details of the setting, 
are all touched with a personal appeal. Nothing is 
presented in its own dry light ; it is all coloured, 
tinged, transformed by the mind of the writer, it all 
ministers to his mood. 

The one artistic fault of the book is, as we have said, 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 113 

the introduction of alien episodes, of actual documents 
into the imaginary fabric ; and these give the effect, so 
to speak, of pictures hung upon a tapestry. The style 
is of course entirely individual ; it is a style of which 
Pater was the inventor ; it is not only easy to imitate, 
but it is almost impossible, if one studies it closely, not 
to fall into the very mannerisms of the writer. Of 
course it is easy to say that it is languid, highly per- 
fumed, luscious, over-ripe ; but here again we fall into 
the error of analysing the essential quality, and dis- 
approving of it. It cannot be pretended that it is 
brisk, lucid, or lively ; there is nothing of " sonorous 
metal, blowing martial sounds," about it; rather it 
winds like a cloud of smoke on a still day, hanging in 
fine-drawn veils and aerial weft. It is intensely delib- 
erate, self-conscious, mannerised. Its fault is to fall 
into involved sentences, with long parentheses and 
melodious cadences. It never trips or leaps or runs ; 
but always moves like a slow pontifical procession, 
stiff-robed, mystical, and profound. It never aims at 
crisp precision, but rather at a subtle refinement, a 
mysterious grace. 

Its finest art is displayed in an economy of impres- 
sion, whose very severity ends in a suggestiveness of 
picture which is attained, not by elaborate description, 
but by haunted glimpses of beauty. These touches of 
perfect loveliness relieve the graver analysis with a 
sudden sense of coolness and repose, as a student may 
look up from a book into a sunny garden, and find in 
the golden light some hallowing, some confirmation of 
the inner mood. And the most severe passages of philo- 
sophical writing are again lit up by exquisite similes 
or still more delicate metaphors, in which the whole 
sentence seems steeped and stained, as with the juice 
of a berry shut in upon the page. 
i 



114 WALTER PATER [chap. 

Thus lie writes : — 

"He, too, paused at the apprehension of that constant 
motion of things — the drift of flowers, of little or great 
souls, of ambitious systems, in the stream around him, the 
first source, the ultimate issue, of which, in regions out of 
sight, must count with him as but a dim problem. ... He 
might reserve it as a fine, high, visionary consideration, very 
remote upon the intellectual ladder, just at the point, indeed, 
where that ladder seemed to pass into the clouds, but for 
which there was certainly no time left just now by his eager 
interest in the real objects so close to him, on the lowlier 
earthy steps nearest the ground." 

No one can say that these sentences are obvious, 
clear, sharply cut. But they are full of a poetical 
suggestiveness, and sparkle with hidden lights like 
opalescent gems. 

Indeed, the writing of Pater may best be compared 
to the opal. It has not the clear facets, the limpid 
colour of the unclouded gem; but it is iridescent, 
rounded, shot with flashing lights and suffused with a 
milky mist of which one can hardly say whether it be 
near or far. It is this strange sense of depth, so 
inherent in a cloudy gem, that it gives one. One can 
measure to a millimetre the actual bulk of the 
jewel ; but within that limit, what spent lights gleam, 
what misty textures roll ! it is like a little coloured 
eyehole, through which one can discern the orbits of 
pale stars, the swimming vapors of some uncreated 
world. 

But the fact is that most of the objections that 
can be urged against Marias are prima facie objec- 
tions ; it is criticised mostly for not possessing qualities 
that it was not meant to have ; it stands as one of the 
great works of art of which it may be said that the 
execution comes very near to the intention. Possibly 



iv.] MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 115 

Pater himself did not feel it to be so ; he said once 
humorously to a friend that he would like to give 
him a copy of the second edition, because the first was 
" so very rough.'' That is a criticism which could have 
entered into no mind except the author's own. It 
remains a monument of sustained dignity and melli- 
fluous precision. The style of it is absolutely distinc- 
tive and entirely new: the thing had never been done 
before ; it is a revelation of the possibilities of poetical 
prose which the English language contains. The fact 
that it is not difficult to imitate is in its favour rather 
than otherwise, because the same is true of all great 
masters of individual style. But the feat was to discern 
and then to display a new capacity in English prose. It 
might have been said with truth that, before the advent 
of Pater, English prose could display qualities of lucid- 
ity, vigor, force; that it could lend itself to stately 
rhetoric and even glowing ornament; but it had never 
before exhibited the characteristic of seductive grace. 
And yet this was effected by Pater by the pure in- 
stinct for what was beautiful and melodious; he has 
no special preference for either the use of Saxon terms 
or for more elaborate Latinisms. He uses both im- 
partially. Indeed his use of short, crisp, emphatic, 
homely words side by side with rotund, sonorous 
classicalities is one of the charms of the style. He 
never hesitates to employ technical, metaphysical 
language, but he contrives to fuse the whole into a 
singular unity; it is not even a fair criticism to say 
that his language is not natural, for there are many 
sentences of an almost childish naivete. The only 
thing of which one is almost invariably conscious is 
of the art employed, and thus the writings of Pater 
appeal more, perhaps, to the craftsman than to the 
ordinary reader, because of the constantly delightful 



116 WALTER PATER [chap. iv. 

sense of difficulties overcome and crooked places made 
straight. There will, of course, always be people who 
will feel a sense of constraint, a lack of freedom. 
But those who feel the charm, will rightly discern in 
Marius the true impassioned poetical quality, guided 
and enforced by severe economy and delicate taste. 

But however much we may analyse the character- 
istics of the style, its inversions, its cadences, its 
peculiar use of metaphor, its accumulation of delicate 
touches, its swift pictorial quality, we cannot penetrate 
its secret any more than we can penetrate the secret 
of the painter or the musician. Unity, due subordina- 
tion, clearness of conception, subtle correspondence of 
language to emotion, these were the qualities which 
Pater used by a sort of fine native instinct. It is the 
natural consequence of our type of classical education, 
which encourages imitation rather than originality, 
and submission to authority rather than individual 
expansion, that we fail to do justice to such an 
achievement as Pater's. We need not look upon his 
work as containing a finality of expression, we need 
not desire that he should originate a school of similar 
writers, but we may recognise gratefully the fact that 
he discovered and exhibited a new possibility in the 
composition of English prose. 



CHAPTER V 



LONDON LIFE 



In 1885, the year of the publication of Marias, Pater 
made a change in his environment; he took a house 
in London, No. 12, Earl's Terrace, Kensington, near 
Holland House, which he held for eight years. This 
change of residence was dictated both by a desire for 
change, and by the feeling that the wider circle and 
more varied influences of London would lend him a 
larger and more vivid stimulus. He still resided 
during the term at Brasenose, and lived in London 
mostly in the vacations. Those who visited him in 
London were struck by the extreme quiet and sim- 
plicity of the household arrangements. Pater went 
a good deal into society, and enjoyed it greatly ; but 
otherwise he just pursued his ordinary routine of 
writing and working as he might have done at Oxford. 
The London period was one of great interest and en- 
joyment ; he found a warm welcome awaiting him in 
literary, artistic, and social circles ; he made many new 
friends, and expanded in many directions. 

In London, as at Oxford, there was never the least 
personal luxury in Pater's menage, though there was 
quiet and solid comfort. His official income and the 
receipts from his books were practically all that he had 
to depend upon. He was fond of travelling, to the 
very end of his life, both in France and Italy. He 
generally went abroad for five or six weeks, and 

117 



118 WALTER PATER [chap. 

always with his sisters. He liked the movement, the 
gaiety, the greater epanouissement of France. He threw 
himself with a deep appreciation into all that he saw, 
and entered, as may be seen from his writings, with 
a sympathetic intensity into the spirit of the build- 
ings, the sculpture, the pictures, the landscapes that he 
saw. He used also to tire himself, on these occasions, 
with excess of walking, his only form of exercise. But 
still, his enjoyment of travel maybe best tested by the 
fact that his favourite tonic for the slight weariness, 
resulting perhaps from the emotional reaction, which 
he experienced for a day or two after his return from 
a tour, was to plan a scheme of travel for the following 
year. 

The years that followed were the most fruitful years 
of Pater's life. The reception of Marius had been both 
respectful and enthusiastic ; it had lifted its author 
into a position in the very front rank of English prose- 
writers. And then, too, the strain of the continuous 
work was lifted off his shoulders, and he was able with 
renewed zest to take up some of the many subjects 
which in the course of those laborious years had 
appealed to him as congenial. He had faithfully and 
religiously eschewed the temptation to pursue them, 
subordinating all vagrant fancies to his central theme; 
he could now expatiate freely; moreover he had 
found, in the course of his work, if not fluency, at all 
events a pleasurable flow of appropriate if character- 
istic language. He began to contribute reviews to the 
Guardian, the Athenaeum, the Pall Mall Gazette. Some 
twenty of these reviews have been identified, and 
nine reviews which appeared in the Guardian have 
been since reprinted, privately in 1896, and latterly 
published 1901. 

These reviews are not of very great intrinsic value ; 



v.] LONDON LIFE 119 

but evidently considerable time has been spent upon 
them ; the book with which they deal has been care- 
fully read, and a delicate appreciation composed. What 
strikes one most in reading them is, in the first place, a 
marked tenderness for the feelings of the author whom 
he is reviewing, and a great and princely generosity of 
praise. There seems to be no severity about Pater ; and 
he enters into the intentions of the writer with a great 
catholicity of sympathy. There is also visible a certain 
irresponsible enjoyment about the tone of the reviews, 
as if with anonymity he had put on a certain gaiety to 
which in his public appearances he felt bound to be a 
stranger. 

Of course no great originality is to be expected in 
these compositions. Thus reviewing three editions of 
Wordsworth in the Guardian of February 27, 1889, he 
does not hesitate to use many of his own deliberate 
dicta from the " Wordsworth " essay which had ap- 
peared in the Fortnightly in 1874, and was to be 
reprinted in the same year in which he wrote the 
review in question (1889), in Appreciations. Perhaps 
the review of Robert El smere (Guardian, March 28, 1888) 
reveals most plainly the almost childlike delight which 
Pater could take in the motif and characters of a 
story which one would have thought would not have 
been by any means congenial to him. 

Pater's chief critical work in 1886 was the essay on 
Sir Thomas Browne, to be published afterwards in the 
Appreciations of 1889. In this study the same prin- 
ciple of autobiographical selection comes out which 
we see so constantly at work in Pater's mind. The 
charm for him in Browne is that whimsical mixture of 
scientific and poetical elements, the ceremonious piety, 
the strong sensitiveness to the human association of 
things, the thirst to record and express a point of view. 



120 WALTER PATER [chap. 

Again, what gives Pater a strong interest in Browne's 
writings is the fact that he exhibits at a remote 
point the evolution of native English prose, that evolu- 
tion which was distracted, we would believe, by the 
wave of classicalism, the effect of the tide of the 
Kenaissance, which beat, belated and enfeebled, on 
our solitary shores. The invasion of English prose by 
the wrong kind of classicalism, the sonorous elabora- 
tion of Latinity instead of the lucid charm of native 
English, deferred, no doubt, the development of 
natural English prose, though it perhaps eventually 
ministered to its richness. Browne, like Montaigne in 
France, is the type of the essayist, the writer whose 
object is not the precise statement of a case, but the 
saturation of a subject in his own personality. Such 
writing is often lacking in structure and conception, 
but it has an indefinable charm. " It has," writes Pater 
of Browne's style, " its garrulity, its various levels of 
painstaking, its mannerism, pleasant of its kind or 
tolerable, together with much, to us intolerable, but of 
which he was capable on a lazy summer afternoon 
down at Norwich." It is just that which is the 
charm; that it brings before us the same elements 
that delight us in our own life, the summer, the fresh- 
ness of the open air, the pleasant house with its gardens 
and studious chambers, together with a venerable set- 
ting which does but heighten the sense that though 
philosophical, political, anil religious theories may 
have shifted and developed, the greater part of men's 
lives and joys are made up out of far simpler and 
commoner elements, which hardly indeed change from 
century to century. 

And then, too, there comes in the art of the psycho- 
logist, "to whom all the world is but a spectacle in which 
nothing is really alien from himself, who has hardly a 






v.] LONDON LIFE 121 

sense of the distinction between great and little among 
things that are at all, and whose half-pitying, half- 
amused sympathy is called out especially by the seem- 
ingly small interests and traits of character in the 
things or the people around him." 

The other points in which the character of Browne 
appealed strongly to Pater are his emotional interest 
in ecclesiastical ceremony, which made him rejoice in 
the return of the comely Anglican order to the Nor- 
wich churches at the time of the Restoration, which 
caused him to weep abundantly at the sight of solemn 
processions; and there is also the vein of curious specu- 
lation about death, his anatomical and antiquarian re- 
searches alike testifying to his preoccupation with the 
thought of the mystery of decay and extinction of 
vital power ; till his life becomes, as Pater says humor- 
ously, "too like a lifelong following of one's own 
funeral." 

Pater brings out very clearly the fact that the 
Religio Medici is perhaps a misleading title. One 
would expect a treatise dealing with scientific analysis, 
tending naturally to materialism and scepticism, but 
struggling through and retaining a hold on religion, all 
the stronger for the speculative temptations that would 
seem to block the way. But Browne, says Pater, "in 
spite of his profession of boisterous doubt, has no real 
difficulties, and his religion, certainly, nothing of the 
character of a concession." He is a convinced Theist, 
and a confirmed pietist. " The Religio Medici is a contri- 
bution, not to faith, but to piety; a refinement and 
correction, such as piety often stands in need of ; a 
help, not so much to religious belief in a world of 
doubt, as to the maintenance of the religious mood amid 
the interests of a secular calling." He goes further, 
indeed, and shows that it is only Browne's method, not 



122 WALTER PATER [chap. 

his mind, that is scientific. "What he is busy in the 
record of, are matters more or less of the nature of 
caprices ; as if things, after all, were significant of their 
higher verity only at random, and in a sort of sur- 
prises, like music in old instruments suddenly touched 
into sound by a wandering finger, among the lumber 
of people's houses." 

And thus, though Browne is in a sense an investi- 
gator, he misses the conclusion to which his investiga- 
tions are tending; because he does not really seek to 
arrive at a conclusion, but only to harmonise facts, as 
he investigates them, with a conclusion which he has 
inherited rather than drawn. 

Of the essay on "Feuillet's La Morte" the work of 
the same year, it is unnecessary to speak. It is a mere 
review, full of copious quotation, with a slender trickle 
of exposition; Pater neither philosophises nor evolves 
principles; he merely analyses the story; indeed, it is 
rather a problem why he eventually included this study 
in the Appreciations at all ; it is significant only of a 
certain catholicity of taste, and bears but few traces of 
his own temperament. 

But Pater was now hard at work on an interesting 
series of experiments of a kind that he may be held to 
have originated. These are the Imaginary Portraits, 
of which the first, " A Prince of Court Painters," was 
written in 1885, as soon as Marius was off his hands; 
two others followed in 1886 — "Sebastian van Storck" 
and " Denys l'Auxerrois " — and a fourth in 1887, " Duke 
Carl of Eosenmold." But beside these four, which com- 
pose the volume known as Imaginary Portraits, there were 
several others which may be referred to the same class. 
"The Child in the House," which has been already 
treated of, is one. "Hippolytus Veiled," the work of 
1889, is another, which has been dealt with among the 



y ] LONDON LIFE 123 

Greek Studies, with which he included it. He told 
Mr. Arthur Symons at the end of his life that he 
intended to bring out a new volume of Imaginary 
Portraits. " Apollo in Picardy," the work of 1893, was 
to have been included, as well as « Emerald Uthwart " 
(1892), of which we have spoken. He added that 
he meant to write one on the picture by Moroni 
known as The Tailor, which he thought a very fine 
and dignified figure. He would make him, he said, 
a Burgomaster. Mr. Ainslie says that he had in 
his mind Count Eaymond of Toulouse as another 
possible subject. 

Pater's method was to take some romantic figure 
which attracted his attention, to form a conception of 
the temperament of the man, and study his environ- 
ment as far as possible. He then would amplify the 
details, working in historical hints; or else, as in 
the case of " Denys l'Auxerrois," it would be a pure 
fantasy, suggested by some trace of a peculiar mind 
revealed in the architecture or sculpture of a particular 
building. 

This was perhaps the most congenial field for a 
temperament like Pater's, that was imaginative rather 
than creative," that needed a definite motif to set his 
imagination at work. 

Thus in the Imaginary PortraitsVatev gave himself up 
to the luxurious pleasure of evolving fantasies arising 
from some biographical hint, some piece of unnamed 
art ; some type of character that he conceived. They 
are true creations, worked out in a sober pictorial 
manner. But they make it abundantly clear that he 
had not the dramatic gift ; there is no attempt at de- 
vising the play of situations, no contrast of character. 
The backgrounds, both of people and of landscape, are 
finely indicated ; but the interest in each concentrates 



124 WALTER PATER [chap. 

upon a single figure, and they are told in a species of 
dreamy recitative. 

"A Prince of Court Painters" is the story of 
Antony Watteau told in the home-keeping journal 
of a girl of his own age, daughter of a crafts- 
man of Valenciennes, who perhaps loves him, though 
with the reticence so characteristic of the author this 
only emerges in a shadowy hint here and there. The 
journal is extraordinarily graceful, and exhibits, to give 
it verisimilitude, many French turns of expression and 
phrase, as though it had been originally conceived in 
French ; but the whole lacks vital truth ; there is too 
much philosophy of a hinted kind, too much criticism ; 
the omission, for instance, of a dozen deliberate phrases 
indicating the supposed sex of the writer, might con- 
vert the whole into the work of a pensive man. There 
is little sentiment or emotion, though it is faintly 
illuminated as by a setting sun with a tender aloofness, 
a spectacular dreamf ulness — a beautiful quality and 
finely conceived, but yet with little hold on nature. 

There is a characteristic thread of personal interest 
interwoven with the story. The girl who writes the 
journal is the sister of Jean Baptiste Pater, the pupil 
of Watteau ; and the artistic progress of her brother, 
his enthusiastic admiration for his master, his patient 
development, which is sharply contrasted with the 
fitful and restless energy of Watteau, plays a real 
though a secondary part in the study. It is also 
highly characteristic of Pater's reticent delicacy that, 
though he liked to fancy the painter a collateral mem- 
ber of his own family, the actual name of Pater is 
never introduced into the piece, the brother figuring 
throughout simply as Jean Baptiste. 

But there is an abundance of fine criticism both of 
life and art in the whole picture. Could the charm 



v.] LONDON LIFE 125 

of Watteau be more delicately captured than in the 
following passage ? — 

" And at last one has actual sight of his work — what it is. 
He has brought with him certain long-cherished designs to 
finish here in quiet, as he protests he has never finished 
before. That charming Noblesse — can it be really so distin- 
guished to the minutest point, so naturally aristocratic? 
Half in masquerade, playing the drawing-room or garden 
comedy of life, these persons have upon them, not less than 
the landscape he composes, and among the accidents of which 
they group themselves with such a perfect fittingness, a cer- 
tain light we should seek for in vain upon anything real. For 
their framework they have around them a veritable archi- 
tecture — a tree-architecture — to which those moss-grown 
balusters, termes, statues, fountains, are really but accessories. 
Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find myself 
always saying to myself involuntarily, < The evening will be 
a wet one.' The storm is always brooding through the massy 
splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, 
where delicate children may be trusted thinly clad ; and 
the secular trees themselves will hardly outlast another 
generation." 

Throughout the whole of the study, as one might 
expect, the personality of Pater emerges in little 
dicta and comments. " Alas ! " writes the girl, " How 
little peace have his great successes given him ; how 
little of that quietude of mind, without which, me- 
thinks, one fails in true dignity of character." 

The interest, then, of this little study lies not so 
much in itself, as in the fact that it is from the 
creative point of view the most ambitious, the most 
deliberately dramatic, of Pater's writings. He at- 
tempted to throw himself into a French mood, and 
in this he has partially succeeded ; and into the mood 
of a quiet girl of the bourgeois class; and here he 
must be held to have failed. Perhaps it revealed to 



126 WALTER PATER [chap. 

him his own limitations, his own strength. For he 
wisely wrote no more in this manner. 

In "Denys FAuxerrois" we have one of the most 
fantastic of all Pater's writings ; indeed, in this strange 
combination of the horrible and the beautiful, there 
is something almost unbalanced, something that re- 
minds one of the rich madness of Blake; as if the 
mind, though kept in artistic check, had flung itself 
riotously over the line that divides imagination from 
insanity; the fancy seems to struggle and trample 
with a strange self-born fury, as though it had taken 
the bit in its teeth, and was with difficulty over- 
mastered. The essay begins soberly enough with a 
vein of quiet reminiscence of . travel ; the writer is 
supposed to see some tapestries at a priest's house 
representing a series of strange experiences ; and it is 
upon this that the story is based. Denys of Auxerre, 
a love-child, comes among the craftsmen of the place, 
like a pagan god incarnate, and fills them, like Dio- 
nysus, with a species of Bacchic fury. This idea, the 
reappearance of pagan deities, had a strong fascination 
for Pater's mind. 

The curious and contradictory traits of the char- 
acter of the boy, gentleness side by side with cruelty, 
wild courage shadowed by unreasonable terrors, his 
unaccountable appearances and disappearances, his 
mysterious gifts of presage and inspiration, are all 
subtly indicated. 

" Long before it came he could detect the scent of rain 
from afar, and would climb with delight to the great scaffold- 
ing on the unfinished tower to watch its coming over the 
thirsty vine-land, till it rattled on the great tiled roof of the 
church below; and then, throwing off his mantle, allow it 
to bathe his limbs freely, clinging firmly against the tem- 
pestuous wind among the carved imageries of dark stone." 



v.] LONDON LIFE 127 

A climax of horror is reached when a search is made 
for the buried body of a patron saint of the church, 
till, in the uncertain light of morning, the coffin is 
found and opened, and the bishop with his gloved 
hands draws out the shrouded shrunken form. At 
this Denys has an access of terror, and rolls in a fit 
upon the grass. But he recovers himself, and though 
by this time suspected of sorcery, he gives much 
anxious care to the setting up of the great organ of 
the church. 

" The carpenters, under his instruction, set up the great 
wooden passages for the thunder ; while the little pipes of 
pasteboard simulated the sound of the human voice singing 
to the victorious notes of the long metal trumpets." 

At last he ventures to appear in public at a pageant. 
The haircloth he wears scratches his lips and makes 
them bleed, and at the sight, an unholy fury fills the 
crowd. He is literally torn in pieces. 

" The soul of Denys was already at rest, as his body, now 
borne along in front of the crowd, was tossed hither and 
thither, torn at last limb from limb. The men stuck little 
shreds of his flesh, or, failing that, of his torn raiment, into 
their caps; the women lending their long hairpins for the 
purpose." 

In such a passage as this the horror passes beyond 
the range of perfect art ; and the shadow is heightened 
by the natural tranquillity and austerity of the writer. 
One cannot help feeliug that Pater was here over- 
powered by his conception, and that he allowed to 
escape him, for almost the only time in his writings, 
a kind of almost animal zest in blood and carnage. 
There is no lack of what is commonly called power, 
but there is a lack of the restraint which as a rule 



128 WALTER PATER [chap. 

Pater so diligently preached. It reminds one of the 
tale of Tod Lapraik in Catriona, where the staid and 
smiling weaver dances alone in a hollow of the rocks 
in the black glory of his heart ; or of the still more 
grim story of Kipling, where the veil that separates 
the man from the brnte is twitched aside, and the un- 
happy wretch, intoxicated by a bestial instinct, asks 
eagerly for raw meat, and rolls and digs in the earth 
beneath the dark shrubs of the garden. 

" Sebastian van Storck " is an astonishing contrast 
to the last. The motif of the essay is devotion to the 
purest and most abstract reason. Sebastian is a young 
Hollander, the son of a Burgomaster of wealth and 
high social position. The young Sebastian, a graceful 
finished nature, but with a strain of phthisis in his 
constitution, is a lonely, isolated young man, out of 
sympathy with the rich, phlegmatic, easy life which 
surrounds him, who is drawn into a track of abstract 
intellectual speculation, partly by a certain mortal 
coldness of temperament, and partly by a clear and 
logical faculty of thought. He becomes interested in 
the philosophy of the young Spinoza, who is a friend 
and contemporary, and he sets out upon a chilly 
pilgrimage of thought with a kind of intellectual dis- 
interestedness, till he arrives at the conclusion that 
the only use to make of life is to cultivate a severe 
detachment from all its interests and ties. His view 
of God becomes ever colder and more impersonal. 

" For him, that one abstract being was as the pallid Arctic 
sun, disclosing itself over the dead level of a glacier, a barren 
and absolutely lonely sea. The lively purpose of life had 
been frozen out of it. What he must admire, and love if he 
could, was ' equilibrium,' the void, the tabula rasa, into which, 
through all those apparent energies of man and nature, that 
in truth are but forces of disintegration, the world was really 



v.] LONDON LIFE 129 

settling. And, himself a mere circumstance in a fatalistic 
series, to which the clay of the potter was no sufficient 
parallel, he could not expect to be ' loved in return.' " 

The crisis comes by his being almost drawn into 
a marriage with a beautiful girl of his own circle. He 
has to a certain extent submitted to her charm, and 
the betrothal is looked upon as an event daily to be 
expected. The girl herself falls under the spell of 
Sebastian's beauty and fascination; and at a social 
gathering at which the friends of both expect and 
desire the pledge to be given and accepted, she betrays 
a certain innocent coquetry, which in Sebastian's tense 
mood acts like water dashed in his face. He is filled 
with a sharp disgust and flies from home, taking refuge 
in a lonely manor-house, the property of his family. 
A spell of stormy weather succeeds and the land is 
inundated. When at last it is possible to reach the 
lonely house through the raging flood Sebastian is 
found dead, having apparently lost his life in saving a 
child, who is discovered unhurt wrapped in Sebastian's 
furs. 

Pater seems in this essay to have endeavoured, we 
will not say to enforce the dangers of the intellectual 
pursuit of abstraction, for the picture has hardly an 
ethical motive, but to depict in neutral tints the 
natural course of the quest of pure reason. It is a 
melancholy essay. Sebastian seems to suffocate under 
warmth and light; and the whole sketch has some- 
thing of the frozen silence, the mute impassivity, of the 
stiffened leafless earth. It is more like a piece of cold 
and colourless sculpture than a picture ; and the con- 
trast of the stainless icy figure of the victim of thought 
thrown into relief by the warm, fire-lit, comfortable 
indoor world, peopled with types of indolent and con- 
tented materialists, is skilfully enough wrought. But 



130 WALTER PATER [chap. 

the subtle beauty of the treatment does not remove a 
certain inner dreariness of thought, and the central 
figure seems to shiver underneath the rich robe draped 
about it. 

" Duke Carl of Eosenmold " is an eighteenth-century 
study of a very different temperament. He is the heir 
of an aged Grand-Duke, and is full to the brim of en- 
thusiasm for art, music, literature, and nature. But 
just as Sebastian van Storck was the victim of an 
excess of intellectual power, so Duke Carl is the victim 
of its defect. His soul is in revolt against stolid 
German heaviness ; he is a typical figure of the spirit 
of the Renaissance, all athirst for beauty and novelty. 
But his temperament is whimsical and unbalanced ; he 
has little originality or lucidity of thought ; he falls 
under the spell of all that is rococo, and mistakes 
novelty for energy ; he takes up each new interest 
with eager zest, but too soon tires of it ; to relieve the 
dreariness of satiety in the search for new sensations, 
he causes his death to be announced and is present in 
disguise at his own funeral. Here he parts company 
with soundness of mind, and in his rebellion against 
all that is conventional he mistakes the true stuff out 
of which unconventionality is made. The true creative 
genius, to use a metaphor, accepts the conventions of 
the age as a sort of necessary frame to impulse, and 
troubles his head little about it ; his concern is with 
the picture itself, how to make it perfectly sincere, 
perfectly impressive. But Duke Carl's originality is 
vitiated by the desire to startle and surprise timid 
natures, and to have his originality admired or at 
least recognised. His grandfather abdicates, and soon 
after dies, and Duke Carl's mind, which has been dis- 
tracted for a while by foreign travel, becomes set upon 
marriage with a peasant girl, partly from real affection, 



v.] LONDON LIFE 131 

partly from a desire to do the unexpected thing. His 
end is somewhat mysterious ; he arranges to meet his 
betrothed in a lonely stronghold, and falls a victim to 
an armed invasion. Contrary to his habit, instead of 
letting the story speak for itself, Pater appends a con- 
clusion in which he says that his object has been to 
sketch a precursor of what may be called the German 
Renaissance, of Lessing and Herder, leading on to 
Goethe. But the interest remains psychical rather 
than historical. The duke is a type of those natures 
who, with an intense susceptibility to artistic influ- 
ences, have no real force of character or conception in 
the background, and fall victims to a neurotic desire, 
which approaches near to vulgarity, to cause a commo- 
tion among stolid and commonplace persons, because 
they are conscious of their inability, from want of real 
intellectual energy, to impress or influence the higher 
natures. 

The whole volume, then, is based on an idea of intel- 
lectual and artistic revolt; each of the four types 
depicted, Watteau, Denys, Sebastian, and Duke Carl, 
is a creature born out of due time, and suffering from 
the isolation that necessarily comes from the conscious- 
ness of being out of sympathy with one's environment. 
In all four there is a vein of physical malady. 
Watteau and Sebastian are phthisical, and Denys and 
Duke Carl are of unbalanced mind. This tendency to 
dwell on what is diseased and abnormal has a curious 
psychological interest ; and it will be observed, too, that 
all the four figures depicted are youthful heroes, en- 
dowed with charm and beauty, but all overshadowed 
by a presage of death. There is thus something of the 
macabre, the decadent element, about the book. 

It will be as well here to consider the two other 
Imaginary Portraits, "Emerald Uthwart" (1892) and 



132 WALTER PATER [chap. 

"Apollo in Picardy" (1893), because, though of 
slightly later date, they in reality belong to the same 
series. 

" Apollo in Picardy " is one of the purest pieces of 
fantasy that Pater ever composed. In its motif it 
much resembles " Denys l'Auxerrois," the conception 
being that of a reincarnation of a sort of pagan spirit, 
perhaps a fallen deity, in the midst of a monastic 
world. 

Prior Saint-Jean, bred as a monk, is occupied in 
middle age in the composition of an abstruse book of 
astronomy and music, dry and scientific enough. He 
is sent, being in indifferent health, down to the Grange 
of the monastery, to superintend the building of a 
great monastic barn. He takes with him a novice 
named Hyacinth, the pet of the community, neat, 
serviceable, frank, boyish. The first evening after 
their arrival the Prior goes into the granary, and finds 
there asleep among the fleeces a young serf of the 
monastery, a youth of extraordinary beauty, with a 
strange harp lying beside him. The Prior mutters a 
collect, conscious of a certain unholy charm, and goes 
softly away. The next day he finds the serf waiting 
upon them. The great barn is built, and a series of 
mysterious and inexplicable circumstances occurs. The 
serf seems to inspire a sort of wild gaiety, a spon- 
taneous art, into the builders, and manifests, too, an 
almost Satanical strength. 

The boy Hyacinth finds this strange creature a 
delightful playmate ; and yet there is a bewildering 
mixture of charm and cruelty about him. The wild 
creatures of the forest will come at his call ; he will 
play with them, and when tired of play will pierce 
them with an arrow or snap their fragile backs. Yet 
they nestle to him to die in his arms. 



v.] LONDON LIFE 133 

Sometimes the cruelty breaks out in horrible ways. 
One evening the great pigeon-house is invaded by some 
creature unknown, which destroys the birds wholesale, 
leaving their bodies ruthlessly rent and torn. Yet 
next day the serf comes weeping to the mass; the 
chapel is found to be strangely decked with exotic 
flowers, and the serf himself joins with his harp in the 
canticles, drawing the rough voices to a silvery music. 

The Prior feels the magical influences of the place 
slowly involving him. He turns to his book, but 
there seems a madness in his brain. Instead of 
penning dry scientific discussions, he finds himself 
impelled against his will to crowd strange drawings 
and illuminations into his book, "winged flowers, or 
stars with human limbs and faces, still intruding 
themselves, or mere notes of light and darkness from 
the actual horizon." 

He comes to again and again from his wild work 
with a shock of terror and disgust. The boy Hyacinth 
becomes terrified at the Prior's strange illusions, his 
loss of memory, his feverish periods of what seems such 
unhallowed work. But one hot, breathless evening he 
is drawn to play again with the serf, whom he begins to 
mistrust. They play with an ancient quoit, which is 
turned up from a grave. Stript to the skin, in wild 
excitement, they play late into the night, till the quoit 
flung by the serf, whether by accident or a sudden 
bloody impulse none knows, crashes into the boy's 
brain, and leaves him dead on the turf. 

The serf flies ; the Prior falls under suspicion of the 
murder, but is claimed by the monastic authorities and 
confined as obviously insane. He spends long hours 
gazing out of the windows, weeping, uttering strange 
words ; till at last his senses return to him, but he 
dies just as his release is permitted. 



134 WALTER PATER [chap. 

The study is full of beauty from end to end, beauty 
and strangeness side by side. Yet it is hard not to 
feel a sort of distempered, almost riotous, fancy at work 
under it all, and there is a cloistered horror about it, 
that reminds one of the old monastic legend of the 
monk who goes late into the dark church to recover 
a volume that he had left there, and finds a strange 
merry thing, in the habit of a priest, leaping all alone 
in unholy mirth before the altar. 

It may be said that this is exactly the effect which 
the writer intended to produce, and the art is manifest. 
But for all that there is a species of uncanny terror 
which invests the tale; not the terror which may in- 
volve the narrative of one who has seen strange things 
and records them faithfully, but the terror with which 
one might watch a magician trafficking in breathless 
secrets, with a certain dark power of using energies 
which seem to menace alike serenity and virtue. 

"Emerald Uthwart" is a little fantasy written in 
1892. The incidents related are simple enough, and yet 
in a way sensational. Emerald is the son of an ancient 
English family, brought up in an old Sussex home, long 
the property of his ancestors, people of an unemphatic 
type. "Why! the Uth warts had scarcely had more 
memories than their woods, noiselessly deciduous." 
He goes to school, contrary to the tradition of the 
family, and the scene of his education is laid at what is 
obviously the King's School, Canterbury. Here he 
forms a great friendship with a boy a little older than 
himself, James Stokes; they go on to Oxford together, 
get commissions in the army, in consequence of the 
breaking out afresh of a war, the scene of which is 
laid in Flanders. They are kept waiting before a 
beleaguered town; James Stokes conceives a plan of 
entering the town with a few men on an expedition 



v.] LONDON LIFE 235 

the object of which is obscure. They enter the town, 
secure their prize — a weather-beaten flag — and issue 
out again to find that the army has moved on ; they 
rejoin their regiment, are tried by court-martial, and 
condemned to death. They are led out to execution, 
and when James Stokes has been shot, the scene being- 
described with a grim realism, it is announced that 
Emerald's sentence has been commuted into one of 
degradation and dismissal. This is carried out; he 
wanders about in want and wretchedness, but finally 
makes his way home, where he eventually dies, after 
a lingering illness of four years, from an old wound, 
aggravated by hardship and mental suffering. Just 
before the end his case is brought before the military 
authorities, and he receives an offer of a commission. 
The story ends by a somewhat terrible extract sup- 
posed to be from a surgeon's diary, who removes the 
ball from the wound. 

The motif of the story is to depict a certain type of 
Englishman, a type of decorous submissiveness. But 
the interest of the type lies rather in the attempt that 
is made to represent it in a character of great modesty 
and simplicity, but with a high natural charm both of 
manner and physical appearance. 

The weakness of the conception may be said to lie 
in the fact, that apart from this external and physical 
charm the character is rather essentially uninterest- 
ing — unambitious and demure — a Spartan, not an 
Athenian type. 

It was probably Pater's object to depict the Spartan 
element of public-school education ; and it is here that 
the main interest of the sketch lies. 

" In fact," he says, " by one of our wise English compromises, 
we still teach our so modern boys the Classics ; a lesson in 
attention and patience, at the least. Nay ! by a double com- 



136 WALTER PATER [chap. 

promise, with delightful physiognomic results sometimes, we 
teach them their pagan Latin and Greek under the shadow of 
medieval church-towers, amid the haunts, the traditions, and 
with something of the discipline, of monasticism ; for which, as 
is noticeable, the English have never wholly lost an early in- 
clination. . . . The result of our older method has had its 
value so far, at least, say ! for the careful aesthetic observer. 
It is of such diagonal influences, through complication of in- 
fluence, that expression comes, in life, in our culture, in the 
very faces of men and boys — of these boys. Nothing could 
better harmonise present with past than the sight of them 
just here, as they shout at their games, or recite their lessons, 
overarched by the work of medieval priors, or pass to church 
meekly, into the seats occupied by the young monks before 
them." 

But there is a certain want of naturalness about the 
conception. The picture of James Stokes descanting 
to his friend on minute points of meaning in Homer, 
in Virgil, lacks reality. Emerald himself, after being 
punished by the headmaster, stands up and says, "And 
now, sir, that I have taken my punishment, I hope you 
will forgive my fault." Not so do English boys behave ! 
And it is just here, in these rare touches of attempted 
drama, that Pater's art invariably breaks down. He 
was aware that his own instinct was not dramatic. 
He wrote (August 9, 1891) to a friend, Mr. Douglas 
Ainsl'3, thanking him for a copy of a play which Mr. 
Ainslie had published, saying that he would read it 
with interest, but adding " the dramatic form of litera- 
ture is not what I usually turn to with most readiness." 

Submissiveness, he says, was the key of Uthwart's 
character : " it had the force of genius with him " ; he 
entered into his work with serious obedience, but feel- 
ing that the perception of great literature was some- 
thing unattainable by himself ; religion too, " its high 
claims, to which no one could be equal ; its reproaches " 



v .] LONDON LIFE 137 

— he felt it all to be immeasurable, " surely not meant 
for the like of him." He is always " repressible, self- 
restrained, always concurring with the influence, the 
claim upon him, the rebuke, of others." He attracts 
the notice of strangers by his unconscious grace and 
healthy beauty ; he is surprised at the charm he exerts 
on others, never elated by it, nor presuming upon it. 
And no doubt it is the intention of the piece to show 
how his one violation of duty, his single deviation from 
strict military obedience, brought with it ruin and 
death — so apparently disproportionate a punishment. 
But he takes his degradation with the same humble 
submissiveness, and it is in the same spirit that he 
meets his death, not repining nor complaining, but 
simply as the orders of some superior power, whom he 
is to obey unflinchingly by a sort of sacred instinct. 
The purpose of the piece, then, is to draw out the beauty 
of the obedient character, a soldierlike simplicity and 
tranquillity. It is hardly necessary to add that the 
accessories are exquisitely finished ; the old house, with 
its scented flower-beds and venerable chambers; the 
ancient stately school, with the Cathedral to which it 
is attached ; but in this one essay it may be said that 
the simplicity of the motive does not wholly harmonise 
with the delicacy of the setting. The thought is tinged 
and coloured by being seen through a somewha't self- 
conscious and sensuous medium. One cannot help feel- 
ing that Emerald would have disliked being regarded 
in this light, being made a picture of ; that is perhaps 
no reason why it should not be attempted, but it mili- 
tates against the success of the story, because one feels 
that Emerald is caught like a butterfly, in the gauzy 
meshes of a net, and is being too intimately, too 
tenderly scrutinised, when he is made for the free air 
and the sun. 



138 WALTER PATER [chap. 

And, artistically speaking, one cannot help regarding 
the extract with which the story ends as a blot. The 
operation for the removal of the ball, the replacing of 
the body in the coffin, with " the peak of the handsome 
nose remaining visible among the flowers " — one feels 
this to be a harsh realism, with an almost morbid dwell- 
ing upon the accidents of mortality, which does a certain 
violence to the whole conception. Thus, though there 
are passages in " Emerald Uthwart " which must always 
rank high among the achievements of Pater, it is 
impossible to resist the feeling that in this painful 
story he was attempting effects to which his art could 
not rise. 

It is not, I think, fanciful to interpret this selection 
of types in the light of Pater's own life, the half-lit at- 
mosphere in which he deliberately or perhaps tempera- 
mentally moved. They are the work of a melancholy 
introspective mind, dwelling wistfully upon the outer 
beauty of the world, but with a deeper current of 
mournful amazement at the brevity and the mystery 
of it all. No doubt Pater, too, felt his own isolation 
heavily rather than acutely. Did he belong, one can 
imagine his asking himself, in spirit, to the earlier, more 
fragrant, more insouciant time, when men were less 
shadowed by the complexity of thought and the in- 
herited conscience of the ages ? Or did he belong to some 
future outburst of simpler, more liberal joy, to a time 
when the heavy commercialism of England, its conven- 
tional politics, its moral confusion, its mercantile view 
of education, should be leavened by beauty and sincere 
joy ? Whichever it was, he had fallen on evil days. 
Oxford itself, that should have been the home of in- 
tellectual and artistic speculation, was crowded by a 
younger generation, whose idea of a University was a 
place where, among social and athletic delights, it was 



v.] LONDON LIFE 139 

possible to defer for a time the necessity of adopting 
practical life. The older men, those who were ac- 
cepted by the academical world as men of leading, were 
too often men of bursarial minds, who loved business 
and organisation better than intellectual freedom. 
Even the keener spirits, both among the younger and 
the older men, were of the dry and rigid type, believ- 
ing in accuracy more than ideas, in definite accumu- 
lation more than intellectual enjoyment. In this 
atmosphere Pater felt himself misunderstood and 
decried. The daring and indiscreet impulses of youth 
had died away, and his unconventionalism had cost 
him dear. What wonder that his thoughts took on a 
melancholy tinge, and that he recurred in mind to the 
thought of figures whose unlikeness to those about 
them, in spite of the fine daring, the beautiful impulses 
of their nature, had brought them dissatisfaction and 
disaster and even death ! 



CHAPTER VI 



LATER WRITINGS 



All this time Pater was engaged upon a great work, 
which was destined never to be finished. Gaston de 
Latour was embarked upon soon after the completion 
of Marius. Five chapters appeared in Macmillan's 
Magazine in the course of 1888. A sixth chapter 
appeared in the Fortnightly Review in the next year 
under the title of " Giordano Bruno/' and various 
other unfinished fragments remain. The chapter 
called " Shadows of Events " is the only one of these 
which has been included in the 1902 volume. In the 
case of a writer as sedulous, as eager for perfection, as 
Pater it is right to withhold the incomplete fragments. 
He seems for some cause to have abandoned the book 
in dissatisfaction. We may speculate as to the cause of 
this. I am myself disposed to think that he found the 
historical setting too complicated and the canvas too 
much crowded. As the story advances the personality 
seems to ebb out of the figure of the hero, and he be- 
comes a mere mirror of events and other personalities. 
The influences, too, that are brought to bear on him are 
of so complicated a nature that his development seems 
hampered rather than enlarged. No doubt Pater felt 
that the book was not exhibiting his own best qualities 
of workmanship ; and there is a growing weariness 
visible, as if he felt that he was failing to cope with the 

140 



chap, vi.] LATER WRITINGS 141 

pressure of historical experience that was closing in 
upon the central figure. 

It may here be said that Pater's best work is that 
which is built up delicately and imaginatively out of 
shadowy hints of events and slender records. His 
power lay in filling in, heightening, and enriching 
faint outlines, not in selecting typical touches from 
great masses of detail. He felt, and rightly, that he 
had mistaken his capacity. The period he had chosen, 
the struggle of Huguenots and Catholics, is crowded 
with salient figures, but to treat it romantically, the 
tact, the swift intuition, of such a writer as Walter 
Scott was needed, sketching in broad washes and bold 
strokes ; not the patient and accumulative toil of a 
minute and delicate writer like Pater. 

The story opens beautifully enough. The boy 
Gaston lives the quiet life of the country at the old 
house of Deux-manoirs in La Beauce, the central corn- 
land of Prance, with the dim shape of the great church 
of Chartres visible, like a ship under press of canvas, 
on the low horizon. 

Gaston is of the same type as Marius — innocent, 
serious, devout, keenly sensitive to impressions of 
beauty. We see him first taking upon himself the 
vows of the ecclesiastical life, " duly arrayed for dedi- 
cation, with the lighted candle in his right hand and 
the surplice folded over his left shoulder," in the dark 
glowing church. 

Somehow the figure fails to appeal to us. We 
feel — could Pater have felt the same ? — that we are 
but meeting Marius over again in altered circum- 
stances. 

Yet the description of the Office, sung in the presence 
of the courtly and vivacious Bishop of Chartres, is full 
of beauty : — 



142 WALTER PATER [chap. 

" It was like a stream of water crossing unexpectedly a dusty 
way — Mirabilia testimonia tua ! In psalm and antiphon, in- 
exhaustibly fresh, the soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that 
undevout hour, from the sordid languor and the mean busi- 
ness of men's lives, in contemplation of the unfaltering vigour 
of the divine righteousness, which had still those who sought 
it, not only watchful in the night but alert in the drowsy 
afternoon. Yes ! there was the sheep astray, sicut ovis quae 
periit — the physical world ; with its lusty ministers, at work, 
or sleeping for a while amid the stubble, their faces upturned 
to the August sun — the world so importunately visible, intrud- 
ing a little way, with its floating odours, in that semicircle of 
heat across the old over-written pavement at the great open 
door, upon the mysteries within." 

The quiet life of the Manor is broken shortly after- 
wards by a sudden visit of the young King Charles 
the Ninth, who enters from a hunting expedition, and 
"with a relish for the pleasant cleanliness of the place " 
utters a shrill strain of half-religious oaths. Pale, 
with an ivory whiteness, vivacious, unbalanced, the 
young king feels the charm of the place, touches a 
lute, talks of verses, and scratches a stanza of his own 
with a diamond upon a window-pane. 

As Gaston lives on his quiet life in a disturbed and 
alarmed country his reflective nature begins to open. 
" In a sudden tremor of an aged voice, the handling 
of a forgotten toy, a childish drawing, in the tacit 
observance of a day, be became aware suddenly of the 
great stream of human tears falling always through the 
shadows of the world." 

He goes on to join the episcopal household of 
Chartres as a page, in the company of other noble 
youths. He makes friends ; books and talk — " the 
brilliant surface of the untried world " — confront him ; 
but his own calm instinct, his tranquillising sense of 
religion, provide the necessary balance. He takes three 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 143 

chosen companions home with him to spend the hot 
bright weeks of the summer ; and here, through the 
poems of Ronsard, the infection of the living and 
breathing spirit of the modern poetry, near, actual, 
tangible like the faces of flowers, seizes upon him. 

"Never before had words, single words, meant so much. 
What expansion, what liberty of heart, in speech : how associ- 
ate to music, to singing, the written lines ! He sang of the 
lark, and it was the lark's voluble self. The physical beauty 
of humanity lent itself to every object, animate or inanimate, 
to the very hours and lapses and changes of time itself. 
An almost burdensome fulness of expression haunted the 
gestures, the very dress, the personal ornaments, of the people 
on the highway." "Here was a discovery, a new faculty, a 
privileged apprehension, to be conveyed in turn to one and to 
another, to be propagated for the imaginative regeneration of 
the world." 

In this excited mood he rides with his companions 
to the Priory, not far away, of which Ronsard was the 
Prior, to see the great man himself. And here Pater 
is at his best. They find the Prior himself digging 
in his garden ; they attend a solemnity in the church; 
they sup with the poet, who, touched by the generous 
enthusiasm of the boys, abandons himself to a sociable 
mood, shows them his treasures, his manuscripts, his 
portraits. But Gaston finds that Ronsard has attained 
to no serenity of spirit; his "roving, astonished eyes" 
reveal him as " the haggard soul of a haggard genera- 
tion." 

Ronsard is sympathetically interested in the ardent 
spirit of the boy, and gives him an introduction to the 
great Montaigne ; whom he presently goes to visit, in 
his chateau in Dordogne. 

"It was pleasant to sleep as if in the sea's arms, amid the 
low murmurs, the salt odour mingled with the wild garden 



144 WALTER PATER [chap. 

scents of a little inn or farm, forlorn in the wide enclosure of 
an ancient manor, deserted as the sea encroached — long ago, 
for the fig-trees in the riven walls were tough and old." 

He finds the great man in his towered manor, with 
the view from the roof of the rich noonday scenery. 
He feels after a few moments' talk as if he had known 
the genial philosopher all his life. 

"In the presence of this indefatigable analyst of act and 
motive all fixed outlines seemed to vanish away. The health- 
ful pleasure of motion, of thoughts in motion ! " 

"Montaigne was constantly, gratefully, announcing his 
contact, in life, in books, with undeniable power and 
greatness, with forces full of beauty in their vigour, like 
lightning, the sea, the torrents." 

The portrait of this splendid human egotist is 
admirably touched, with a wealth of subtle illustration 
from his writings. His deeply sceptical spirit, his 
vivid agnosticism, confronted again and again with 
hopeless mysteries, and yet for ever turning back 
upon the quest, undaunted, unsated, absolutely sincere, 
admitting his own egotism with frank humour — " in 
favour of the Huguenots, who condemn our private 
confession, I confess myself in public.'' And this 
outward egotism of manner was but the symptom of a 
certain deeper doctrinal egotism; — "I have no other 
end in writing but to discover myself." 

Pater indicates, with perfect insight, the "broad, 
easy, indifferent" passage of Montaigne through the 
world, his relish for meat and drink and corporeal 
sensation; and yet, side by side with this, a curious, 
superstitious, formal kind of piety, all springing from 
the same worship for the whole of humanity. But 
after all, it was the sincerity and tolerance of the 
man that was the charm, his quaint fancy, his rich 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 145 

sympathy, his perfect comprehension; the influence 
that he exercised was that of one who made no selec- 
tion of moods and things, but tasted all, enjoyed all. 

Then follows the chapter called " Shadows of 
Events," which it was well to publish, but about which 
it is easy to comprehend Pater's own hesitation. It is 
a historical survey mainly, but the impression is all 
clouded and blurred ; one cannot help feeling that the 
one thing lacking to Pater was the very largeness 
of tolerance which he described so admiringly in 
Montaigne; certain characteristics, certain brilliant 
points, attract 'him ; but he cannot visualise what he 
does not admire. The characters that play a large, 
robust, coarse, straightforward part are all outside of 
him, incomprehensible, repellent. The types whom 
Pater discerned so clearly were those who crept some- 
what remotely, spectatorially, even timidly, through 
the throng, who lived the interior life of thought and 
speculation and appreciation, tasting the finer savours ; 
not those who strode out boldly, feeling the air of the 
world their native air. Something of this melancholy 
aloofness was true of Pater himself, and he draws near 
only to those in whom he discerns something of the 
same wistful remoteness. 

" Looking back afterwards," says Pater of Gaston, " this 
singularly self-possessed person had to confess that under 
(the) influence (of the unsettled conditions of the age) he 
had lost for a while the exacter view of certain outlines, 
certain real differences and oppositions of things in that 
hotly-coloured world of Paris, — like a shaken tapestry 
about him." 

The last phrase is exactly true of the chapter — it is 
a shaken tapestry, a multitude of blurred heads and 
faces, confused gestures, agitated forms. 



146 WALTER PATER [chap. 

And so we pass to the dignified banishment of 
Charles, and the arrival of the new king ; when across 
the story breaks the teaching of Bruno — Pantheism, 
as it is named, "the vision of all things in God," as 
the end and aim of all metaphysical speculation. 

Bruno, originally a Dominican monk, had conceived 
the idea of the wholeness of life in a spiritual region. 

" Through all his pantheistic nights, from horizon to 
horizon, it was still the thought of liberty that presented 
itself, to the infinite relish of this ' prodigal son ' of Dominic. 
God the Spirit had made all things indifferently, with a 
largeness, a beneficence, impiously belied by any theory of 
restrictions, distinctions, of absolute limitation. Touch! 
see ! listen ! eat freely of all the trees of the garden of 
Paradise, with the voice of the Lord God literally every- 
where ! — here was the final counsel of perfection." 

What repels Gaston in the teaching of Bruno is the 
want of artistic distinction and refinement about his 
theory. The instinct of the artist was just that — to 
define, disentangle, discern, to distinguish between 
"the precious and the base, aesthetically; between 
what was right and wrong in the matter of art." 

It is not clear then how the doctrine of Bruno or 
even of Montaigne was to affect the spirit of Gaston. 
It is a case of a soul the very breath of whose life was 
the arriving at canons of some kind, whose most sacred 
duty appeared to be to select from the immense mass 
of experience and material flung so prodigally down in 
the world, the things that belonged to his peace. The 
difficulty is to comprehend what was to be the issue. 
In the theory of Montaigne and Bruno alike, Gaston is 
brought into contact with types essentially uncritical, 
and one would suppose that they were intended to 
have an enlarging effect. But the hint seems rather 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 147 

to be that they were to act in the opposite direction, 
and to throw Gaston back upon the critical attitude, as 
the one safeguard in the bewildering world. 

One feels as though Pater had here essayed too large 
a task ; that he was, so to speak, preaching to himself 
the doctrine of robust tolerance, of good-humoured sym- 
pathy with a more vivid and generous life ; and that 
he could not to his satisfaction depict the next steps 
in the development because it was precisely the very 
type of development of which he had had no personal 
experience. 

Thus the book, from its very incompleteness, has the 
interest of being again an intimate self-revelation. It 
stands like a great unfinished canvas by a master of 
minute, imaginative, suggestive portraiture. Only, one 
is tempted to wish that he had not given so much 
thought and energy to so baffling a task — that he had 
constructed more of those solitary figures which he 
had, as we know, in his mind, in which his powers 
would have had their full scope, in which every delicate 
touch would have told. 

After the publication of the five chapters of Gaston 
de Latour, Pater gave himself up to the composition of 
one of the most interesting of all his productions. 

The essay on " Style,' 7 which appeared in the Fort- 
nightly Review of December 1888, and was prefixed to 
Appreciations in 1889, is one of Pater's most elaborate 
and finished productions. It is indeed so elaborate, so 
carefully wrought, it disdains so solemnly the devices 
that bring lucidity, the way-posts and milestones of the 
road, that in reading it one is apt to lose the sense of 
its structure, and not to realise what a simple case he 
is presenting. Professor Seeley used to enunciate the 
maxim to those whose essays he was criticising, " Let 
the bones show ! " Well, in Pater's essay the bones do 



148 WALTER PATER [chap. 

not show; not only does the rounded flesh conceal 
them, but they are still further disguised into a species 
of pontifical splendour by a rich and stiff embroidered 
robe of language. 

He begins by dismissing with a great subtlety of 
illustration the ancient principle that a sharp distinc- 
tion can be drawn between prose and poetry, showing 
that it is not true that poetry differs only from prose 
by the presence of metrical restraint ; but that while a 
severe logical structure must underlie poetry, prose can 
exhibit high imaginative qualities ; and that the real 
distinction in literature is between the literature that 
is imaginative, and the literature that attempts merely 
the transcription of fact. He points out that the 
moment that argument passes from the mere presenta- 
tion of a theorem and becomes a personal appeal, that 
moment is the border-line crossed; and that in the 
work of the historian the poetical element is to be 
found in the personal element of selection which is 
bound to come in, and which may then transform state- 
ment into art. 

" Just in proportion," he says, " as the writer's aim, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of 
the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes 
an artist, his work/me art ; and good art (as I hope ultimately 
to show) in proportion to the truth of his presentment of that 
sense ; as in those humbler or plainer functions of literature 
also, truth — truth to bare fact, there — is the essence of such 
artistic quality as they may have. Truth ! there can be no 
merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty 
is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call 
expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision 
within." 

He goes on to say that imaginative prose is the special 
art of the modern world, " an instrument of many stops, 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 149 

meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, 
plaintive, fervid." 

He then passes to the proposition that the art of the 
craftsman of words must be essentially a scholarly art ; 
that the best writer, "with all the jealousy of a lover 
of words, will resist a constant tendency on the part 
of the majority of those who use them to efface the 
distinctions of language " ; but there must be no hint 
of pedantry ; the tact of the great writer being em- 
ployed in seeing what new words and usages really en- 
rich language and make it elastic and spontaneous, as 
well as what additions merely debase it. And then, 
too, the word-artist must employ " a self-restraint, a 
skilful economy of means " ; every sentence must have 
its precise relief, " the logically filled space connected 
always with the delightful sense of difficulty over- 
come. " He must employ "honourable artifice" to 
produce a peculiar atmosphere ; and thus the perfect 
artist will be recognised by what he omits even more 
than by what he retains. " For in truth all art does 
but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last 
finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last 
particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination 
of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according 
to Michelangelo's fancy, in the rough-hewn block of 
stone." 

The one essential thing, then, is " that architectural 
conception of work, which foresees the end in the 
beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every 
part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence 
does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify 
the first." 

"All depends upon the original unity, the vital 

wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension 

i or view." It must be composition, and not loose 



150 WALTER PATER [chap. 

accretion. The literary artist must leave off " not in 
weariness and because he finds himself at an end, but 
in all the freshness of volition." 

He admits that there are instances of great writers 
who have been no artists, who have written with a kind 
of unconscious tact ; but he maintains that one of the 
greatest pleasures of really good literature is " in the 
critical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure." 

He sums up this part of the subject by saying that 
all good literature must be directed both by mind and 
soul, the mind giving the logical structure, the soul 
lending the personal appeal. 

He then diverges into an elaborate illustration 
drawn from the methods of Flaubert, whose theory it 
was that though there might be a number of ways of 
expressing a thought, yet that there was one perfect 
way, if the artist could only find it, one unique word, 
one appropriate epithet, phrase, sentence, paragraph, 
which alone could express the vision within; and 
again he enforces his belief in the " special charm in 
the signs of discovery, of effort and contention towards 
a due end."" 

Truth, then, is the essential quality, truth of concep- 
tion, truth of expression ; and style must be character- 
istic and expressive of personality, and though taking 
its form from the conception, must take its colour from 
the temperament; and indeed that it should do so, 
that it should indicate the personal colour, is but an- 
other manifestation of sincerity. 

Thus it will be seen that whether art is good 
depends upon the soul of the creator, whether it is 
great depends upon the mind ; and then in memorable 
words he adds that if art 

" be devoted further to the increase of men's happiness, to the 
redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sym- 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 151 

pathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old 
truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may 
ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as 
with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great art; if, 
over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and soul 
— that colour and mystic perfume, and that reasonable struc- 
ture, — it has something of the soul of humanity in it, and 
finds its logical, its architectural place, in the great structure 
of human life." 

I have dwelt at length on this essay, because in one 
sense it is the summary of Pater's artistic creed. It is 
perhaps the only direct and personal revelation of his 
theory of his art ; but it will be observed throughout 
that he is speaking not to the outer circle, not even to 
the critical reader ; it is not a concio ad populum, but a 
concio ad clerum. The audience whom he had in mind 
were the initiated, the craftsmen ; and the whole ora- 
tion presupposes a species of mystical apprehension of 
the work of the artist ; hence comes his insistence on 
the delight that arises from the sense of difficulties 
overcome, a delight which only the artist who has 
striven much and failed often can share. It is there- 
fore a technical discourse ; and dealing with it from 
this point of view, it must be confessed that in two 
points it falls short of perfect catholicity and reveals 
the personal bias. The first of these is the point that 
has just been indicated, that from the highest art of 
all, such as the art of Shakespeare and Virgil, Dante and 
Homer, the sense of effort, of obstacles surmounted, dis- 
appears. Celare artem, that is the triumph ; that the 
thing should appear simple, easy, inevitable. For in 
the pleasure that the artist takes in seeing a difficulty 
successfully wrestled with and overcome, there creeps 
in a certain self-consciousness, a species of gratified 
envy in seeing that, supreme as the process is, the 



152 WALTER PATER [chap. 

difficulty was there ; the absence, indeed, of this sense 
of effort is what keeps many critical students of art 
away from the highest masterpieces, and allows them to 
feel more at their ease in art where the mastery is not 
so complete. But this is a condition that one desires 
to remove rather than to emphasise; it is based on 
weakness and fallibility, rather than on strength and 
confidence./ 

And the second {joint, which is allied closely to this, 
is that Pater presses too heavily upon laboriousness in 
art at the expense of ecstatic freedom ; because though 
there are among the greatest artists many instances 
of those who have attained supremacy by endless and 
painstaking labour, yet, in the case of the best artists 
of all, they seem to start at a point to which others may 
hardly attain, to be more like the inheritors of perfect 
faculty than the laborious acquirers of it. Writers like 
Scott and Thackeray, for instance, not to travel far for 
instances, seem to have achieved, as Scott himself said, 
their best results by a "hurried frankness" of execution, 
and to have produced by a kind of instinct what others 
have to learn to produce by toil and thought. 

And thus it is that the essay, in its very incomplete- 
ness and partiality of view, has an immense value as 
an autobiographical document, and helps us, if it is 
the personality of Pater that we desire to apprehend 
and penetrate, to draw closer to the real man, in his 
strength and in his limitations, than any other extant 
writing; and is indeed a piece of intimate self- 
revelation. 

Moreover, the concluding paragraphs of the essay, 
the frank confession of his belief, in words which his 
natural reticence make into what may be carelessly re- 
garded as a piece of tame and conventional rhetoric, in 
the ultimate mission of art, have an intense and vital 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 153 

significance; the increase of sympathy, the amelioration 
of suffering, the service of humanity — these, then, were 
in his deliberate view the ends of art. The very use, 
in the very crucial passage of the summary, of the 
vague and trite phrase "the glory of God" as a motive 
for high art, has a poignant emphasis : it reveals the 
very depth of the writer's soul. He of all men, at the 
very crisis of the enunciation of his creed, could never 
have used such an expression unless it contained for 
him an essential truth; and this single phrase bears 
eloquent testimony to the fact that, below the 
aesthetic doctrine which he enunciated, lay an ethical 
base of temperament, a moral foundation of duty and 
obedience to the Creator and Father of men. 

In the course of 1889 — not a prolific year — "Hippo- 
lytus Veiled " appeared in Macmillan's Magazine, and 
"Giordano Bruno," one of the Chapters of Gaston de 
Latour, in the Fortnightly. Pater also published the 
Appreciations — rather a made-up volume, one is forced 
to reflect, the kind of book that is issued in response 
to the appeal of a publisher. We have already dis- 
cussed all the contents of the volume, except the 
Shakespearian studies, three in number, of which 
" Measure for Measure " had appeared in 1874, 
"Love's Labours Lost" in 1878. "Shakespeare's 
English Kings" had not appeared before, and was 
the only new item in the volume. Two facts are 
noticeable about the book. The essay on "Aesthetic 
Poetry," written in 1868, reappeared here, but was 
omitted in the later edition of 1890; and the study 
called "Romanticism," written in 1876, reappeared as 
a Postscript. 

The Shakespearian studies do not demand any very 
close attention. In the little essay on " Love's La- 
bours Lost " he points out that in the play Shakespeare 



154 WALTER PATER [chap. 

was dallying with Euphuism. "It is thi« foppery 
of delicate language, this fashionable plaything 
of his time, with which Shakespeare is occupied in 
'Love's Labours Lost.'" But he points out, too, that 
in dealing with a past age, one cannot afford to neglect 
a study of its playthings: "For what is called fashion 
in these matters occupies, in each age, much of the 
care of many of the most discerning people, furnishing 
them with a kind of mirror of their real inward refine- 
ments, and their capacity for selection. Such modes 
or fashions are, at their best, an example of the artistic 
predominance of form over matter; of the manner of 
the doing of it over the thing done; and have a beauty 
of their own." And this, he concludes, is the chief 
value of the play. 

In the essay on "Measure for Measure" he shows 
that the play is a remodelling of an earlier and rougher 
composition; but he points out that the value and 
significance of it is that Shakespeare works out of 
it "a morality so characteristic that the play might 
well pass for the central expression of his moral judg- 
ments." He says that we have in it " a real example 
of that sort of writing which is sometimes described as 
suggestive, and which by the help of certain subtly 
calculated hints only, brings into distinct shape the 
reader's own half-developed imaginings." He notes 
the dark invasion of the shadow of death in the play, 
death the Ui great disguiser,' blanching the features of 
youth and spoiling its goodly hair, touching the fine 
Claudio even with its disgraceful associations." And 
further, he touches with exquisite skill the way in 
which Shakespeare here brings out, by a sudden 
vignette, a romantic picture of a scene; the episode 
of Mariana, "the moated grange, with its dejected 
mistress, its long, listless, discontented days, where we 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 155 

hear only the voice of a boy broken off suddenly in 
the midst of one of the loveliest soriga of Shakespeare, 
or of Shakespeare's school, is th i pleasantest of many 
glimpses we get here of pleasant places." Not less 
delicate is the apprehension of the character of Isabella, 
so tranquil, chaste, and sisterly at first, changed, by 
the inrush of cor tending passions, in a moment, into 
something fierce, vindictive, and tiger-like. He sums 
up his conclusion by saying that the charm of the 
work is its underlying conception of morality, not the 
morality which opposes a blunt and stubborn front to 
the delicate activities of life, but the artistic morality 
that watches, judges, values and appreciates, and is on 
the side of culture rather than on the side of prejudice 
and rectitude. 

The essay on "Shakespeare's English Kings" (1889) 
is rather a slight performance, and the analysis of a 
somewhat superficial kind. Pater, for instance, almost 
fails to realise the magnificence of the conception of 
Richard n., the tragedy of which consists in the fact 
that, at a sudden crisis, a prompt force and vigour are 
demanded of a ruler whose nature is full indeed of 
wise and fruitful thoughts, but whose position calls for 
a bluff and cheerful energy, when all that he can give 
is a subtle and contemplative philosophy. But he 
traces the general motive finely: — 

"No!" he says, "Shakespeare's kings are not, nor are 
meant to be, great men : rather, little or quite ordinary 
humanity, thrust upon greatness, with those pathetic results, 
the natural self-pity of the weak heightened in them into 
irresistible appeal to others as the net result of their royal 
prerogative. One after another, they seem to lie composed in 
Shakespeare's embalming pages, with just that touch of nature 
about them, making the whole world akin." 

He ends by a subtle passage, not fully worked out, 



156 WALTER PATER [chap. 

indicating + hat as unity of impression in a work of 
art is its per.?e°.t virtue, and as lyrical poetry is the 
best vehicle for such unity, then " a play attains artistic 
perfection just in proportion as it approaches that unity 
of lyrical effect, as if a song or ballad were still lying 
at the root of it." 

In these Shakespearian studies, produced at points 
so far apart in Pater's life, the chief interest is that he 
should have approached Shakespeare at all. It is after 
all another testimony to the width and largeness of 
Shakespeare's mind, that it should have forced an 
expression of admiration from a spirit so introspective, 
so definite in its range, so preoccupied with a theory, 
as Pater's. Moreover, as we have seen, dramatic art 
had little attraction for him. One feels that he does 
not enter into the humanity, the profundity, of Shake- 
speare. He is like a man who hovers about the 
thickets that lie on the verge of a great forest, peep- 
ing into the glades, noting the bright flowers and the 
sweet notes of hidden birds, but with little desire 
to thread the wood or penetrate its haunted green 
heart. 

The years 1890 and 1891 were not apparently very 
fruitful; indeed the latter was one of the six, out 
of the twenty-nine years of Pater's literary life, in 
which he published nothing but a review or two; 
but he was hard at work on his Plato and Platonism, 
which began to appear in 1892. 

"Prosper Merimee" was written as a lecture in 1890, 
and thus belongs to the last period of Pater's work. 
He begins by a melancholy summary of the century — 
Merimee was born in 1803 — a century of disillusion- 
ment, in which the ancient landmarks had been re- 
moved, and men began to ask themselves whether of 
all the ancient fabric of tradition, of thought, of prin- 



ti.] LATER WRITINGS 157 

ciples, there was anything certain at all. To make the 
best of a changed world — that was the problem ; and 
thus art and literature would tend to become pastimes, 
fierce games born of a desperate sort of make-believe, 
just to pass the time that remained. Whatever else 
was uncertain, it was at least certain that life had 
somehow to be lived; if the great old words like 
patriotism, virtue, honour, were mere high-sounding 
names, and stood only for burnt-out illusions, at least 
there was a space to be filled, before the dark hours 
came bringing with them the ultimate certainty. 

Prosper Merimee, in Pater's view, is the summary 
and type of these tendencies. The world is utterly 
hollow to him ; his cynicism is complete and all-embrac- 
ing. He is indifferent to ideas, to politics, to art ; but 
there still remains the vast and inconsequent spectacle 
of human life to study, to amuse oneself with, to de- 
pict with a contemptuous grace. History, artistically 
selected and displayed, is perhaps the best distraction 
of all. History reveals, no doubt, little but desperate 
and passionate illusions, but even so there is a narcotic 
interest about the spectacle. Into this quarry of 
ancient materials Merimee flings himself with the zest 
and appetite of an energetic mind. And so, too, there 
were similar possibilities of romance in the modern 
world. Corsica, where the scene of Colomba is laid, was 
a place still full of primal, simple, passionate emotions 
— exaggerated, no doubt, and unreasonable, but still un- 
questionably there. Even that morbid personal pride 
with its passion for revenge, its view of life as a sacri- 
fice to honour, offers a stimulus to the imagination, 
though the terror of it is free from all interfusion of 
pity. 

Pater skilfully indicates the perfect art of Merimee, 
the minute proportion, the horror of all loose and 



158 WALTER PATER [chap. 

otiose statement, issuing in a style of which every 
part is closely tied with every other part, and the 
end synchronises sharply with the conclusion of the 
story ; and further, he characterises the human charm 
of the Lettres a une Inconnue, where the author seems 
surprised and baffled by the unsuspected violence of 
his own emotion ; the fine intellectual companionship 
of which he is in search betraying him suddenly, like 
a crust of ashes over a smouldering fire. 

He concludes with an interesting passage which 
shows that impersonality was the aim of Merimee's art, 
so that his books stand " as detached from him as from 
each other, with no more filial likeness to their maker 
than if they were the work of another person." The 
same is true of his style — " the perfection of nobody's 
style," as Pater cleverly calls it — " fastidiously in the 
fashion — an expert in all the little, half-contemptuous 
elegances of which it is capable ... a nice observer 
of all that is most conventional." 

And thus we see that the absence of soul, of subjec- 
tivity, of peculiarities, is at once the weakness and the 
strength of Merimee's work. It is all pure mind, and 
produces a singular harshness of ideal, so that " there 
are masters of French prose whose art has begun where 
the art of Merimee leaves off." 

It is a fine piece of critical analysis, perhaps a little 
overstated, but essentially true. Merimee does not 
succeed quite to the extent that Pater thinks in abso- 
lute self-effacement, but he has seen clearly enough the 
spirit of the man ; and though his exposition marches 
somewhat relentlessly on, discarding such evidence 
as may tell against his theory, yet he has somehow 
penetrated the secret of this brilliant writer with his 
flawless polish, his inner hardness, as only a great 
critic can. 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 159 

Of the delivery of this lecture on Merimee, the 
President of Magdalen says : — 

" A large audience, too large for the ugly and inconvenient 
Lecture Room at the Taylorian, came to hear him. He 
seemed surprised and overwhelmed. I don't think he knew 
how much of a celebrity he was, and he seemed a little 
frightened. He read his lecture in a low monotonous voice." 

In the same year appeared the " Art Notes in North 
Italy." It is what it professes to be, a little study of 
certain Italian painters, jottings from an artistic travel- 
ler's diary, and deserves no special consideration, ex- 
cepting in so far as it reveals Pater's preferences and 
his method. 

In 1892, besides the first chapters of Plato and 
Platonism, and an ingenious and beautiful essay on 
the study of Dante, written as an introduction to Mr. 
C. L. Shadwell's translation of the Purgatory, Pater 
published, in successive numbers of the New Review, 
" Emerald Uthwart," which has been considered among 
the Imaginary Portraits. In the same year the essay 
on " Raphael " was written, as a lecture, and it thus 
differs in style to a certain extent from the more de- 
liberate literary works, though less, perhaps, in the 
case of Pater than would be the case with many 
writers. But he certainly aimed at producing some- 
thing which should be capable of being apprehended 
by an interested listener on a first hearing ; there is 
less concentration, less ornament, less economy of 
effect, than in the more deliberate writings. The essay 
presupposes a certain knowledge of the subject, and 
aims at bringing out the central motif of the life of 
the great painter relieved against a somewhat shadowy 
and allusive background of events. But the central 
thought is not lacking in clearness. 



160 WALTER PATER [chap. 

" By his immense productiveness, by the even per- 
fection of what he produced, its fitness to its own day, 
its hold on posterity, in the suavity of his life, some 
would add in the ' opportunity ' of his early death, 
Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness, 
of the good fortune, of genius." This is an admirable 
summary; and he adds that upon a careful examina- 
tion of his works " we shall find even his seemingly 
mechanical good fortune hardly distinguishable from 
his own patient disposal of the means at hand." He 
goes on to show that the supreme charm of Raphael's 
nature was in his teachableness, his prompt assimila- 
tion of influences, his essential humility and tran- 
quillity; that his genius was not a vivid, tortured 
thing, like a lightning-flash, with prodigious efforts 
long matured in the womb of the cloud, with intervals 
of despairing silence and ineffectiveness — but a tran- 
quil, equable progress : " genius by accumulation ; the 
transformation of meek scholarship into genius." Pater 
says, indeed, that Raphael may be held to be the su- 
preme example of the truth of the beatitude that the 
meek shall inherit the earth. He traces the steps of 
this progress. He shows him stainless, unruffled, un- 
tainted by the restlessness of the age that flowered in 
sin, and yet able by a supreme insight to transfer the 
hinted presence of fantastic evil into his pictures ; he 
shows his gradual mastery of dramatic intensity, till he 
could concentrate the whole of a picture on one point, 
subordinate the whole scene to some central and poig- 
nant emotion. And he brings out, too, with great skill, 
that Raphael was always in his own thought a learner, 
with no desperate prejudice for originality, always 
open to influence, yet transfiguring and transmuting 
influence into higher and higher conceptions of his 
own. At last he brings him to Rome, where his life 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 161 

seems " as we read of it, hasty and perplexed, full 
of undertakings, of vast works not always to be com- 
pleted, of almost impossible demands on his industry, 
in a world of breathless competition, amid a great 
company of spectators, for great rewards." Among 
these mighty tasks stands foremost his divergence 
into architecture, appointed, as he was, to succeed 
Bramante as architect of St. Peter's. But all through 
shines out the unspoilt nature, making its charm felt 
upon artists and courtiers alike, the same unhasting, 
unresting diligence, the same smiling youthfulness of 
demeanour. 

He shows the mental force of Raphael's conceptions, 
his unequalled power of apprehending and transmit- 
ting to others complex and difficult ideas with a real 
philosophical grasp, yet for all his technique, all his 
wealth of antiquarian knowledge, never losing sight 
of essential beauty and peace. Pater instances as the 
supremely salient instance of his art the Ansidei or 
Blenheim Madonna, now in the National Gallery. It 
is not impossible that he was guided in this selection 
by a consideration for those whose opportunities for 
acquainting themselves with Raphael's art were bound 
to be limited. " I find there," he says, " at first sight, 
with something of the pleasure one has in a propo- 
sition of Euclid, a sense of the power of the under- 
standing, in the economy with which he has reduced 
his material to the simplest terms, has disentangled 
and detached its various elements." " Keep them to 
that picture," he adds, " as the embodied formula of 
Raphael's genius." The conclusion of the essay comes 
rather suddenly, and he sums up the purpose of Ra- 
phael's life in the phrase, " I am utterly purposed that 
I will not offend." It is this balance of temperament, 
this steady deliberate bias to perfect purity, that is the 



162 WALTER PATER [chap. 

note of his life. He is the Galahad of art, arid might 
say with Galahad — 

" My strength is as the strength of ten, 
Because my heart is pure." 

The essay is thus a careful and sympathetic attempt 
to give to learners a lucid introduction to the art of 
Kaphael. But it differs from his own chosen subjects, 
and is therefore less characteristic of Pater as a writer 
than much of his work — in that there is no attempt 
at tracing the recondite, the suggestive element, in the 
work of Raphael. He intermingles little of his own 
preference, his own personality, with the verdict ; but 
it is still deeply characteristic of Pater in another 
region of his mind, of the patient sympathy which he 
was always ready to give, of his desire to meet others 
halfway, not to mystify or to bewilder the half-culti- 
vated learner, whose zeal perhaps may outrun his 
critical knowledge, with more remote considerations, 
but to draw the rays into a single bright focus, rather 
than, as Pater so often did, resolve the single ray into 
rainbow tints and prismatic refractions. Here, then, 
at least, we see Pater in the light of the educator, the 
scribe, the expounder of mysteries, rather than as the 
hieratic presenter of the deeper symbol. 

Plato and Platonism, certain chapters of which ap- 
peared in 1892, was eventually published in 1893, and 
thus was the main and serious occupation of Pater's 
last years. He placed the book at the head of his own 
writings. A friend once asked him whether he thought 
that The Renaissance or Marius was his best book. 
" Oh, no," he said, " neither. If there is anything of 
mine that has a chance of surviving, I should say it 
was my Plato." 

I do not propose here to discuss the accuracy and the 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 163 

justice of his picture of the Platonic philosophy, or 
how far it harmonises with received conceptions. There 
are points, for instance, in his presentment of the 
Platonic doctrine, with which it is easy to disagree ; 
I merely intend to indicate the conception which Pater 
formed and expressed, the angle at which the idea 
impinged upon his own mind. 

He intended it primarily to be a useful book, an 
educational work. He says in his preface that his aim 
was to interest young students of philosophy ; and he 
says at the outset of the book, " The business of the 
young scholar ... in reading Plato, is not to take his 
side in a controversy, to adopt or refute Plato's 
opinions, to modify, or make apology for, what may 
seem erratic or impossible in him ; still less, to furnish 
himself with arguments on behalf of some theory or 
conviction of his own. His duty is rather to follow 
intelligently, but with strict indifference, the mental 
process there, as he might witness a game of skill." 
His own object, therefore, in the book is not primarily 
philosophical ; it is rather critical and historical — to 
put Plato in his proper place and to see the relation 
which he bore to his age. 

Indeed it would be misleading to speak of Pater as 
a philosopher in the technical sense of the word, 
namely, as one who publishes systematic or consecutive 
thoughts upon the ultimate nature of things. Pater 
was merely philosophically cultured, and the most we 
can say of his philosophy is that his mental attitude is to 
a considerable extent determined by his interest in the 
study of philosophical opinions. He was, then, a philo- 
sopher in the sense that Buskin, for instance, was not 
a philosopher ; but Pater would not be accepted among 
critical writers as a philosopher in the technical sense. 

It was ingeniously said of Pater, that he was a philo- 



164 WALTER PATER [chap. 

sopher who had gone to Italy by mistake instead of to 
Germany. There is a real truth in this epigram. He 
had a deep-seated sense of the mysterious inner rela- 
tion of things, an intense desire to discern and dis- 
entangle the bare essential motives of life; but 
instead of attacking this in the region of pure and 
abstract thought, he touched it through the sense of 
beauty. It was beauty that seemed to him the most 
characteristic, the most significant thing in the world, 
that beauty touched with strangeness of which he so 
seriously spoke ; and his preoccupation was to pene- 
trate the strangeness, to trace the mystery back to 
primal emotion, while he watched, with the intensest 
eagerness and the most sacred thrill, the rich accumu- 
lation of beauty, apprehended and expressed by so many 
personalities, such varied natures, which the human race 
acquired and made its own, leaving its fine creations to 
exist as monuments of its currents and movements, 
like the weed-fringed posts that mark the sea-channel 
over the estuary's sands ; while they gathered year by 
year the added beauty of age and association, yet 
never losing the pathos, the heart-hunger, the unful- 
filled desire, that hangs like a sweet and penetrating 
aroma round the beautiful things that men have made 
and loved, and have been forced to leave behind them. 
The passionate desire to create and express, followed 
by the consecration of sorrow and darkness, these two 
strains mingled for Pater into a strain of high solemnity 
and pathetic sweetness. 

But he can hardly be said to have had any philo- 
sophical system, just as he himself believed Plato to 
have had none. Plato's writings represented to Pater 
an atmosphere, not a defined creed. Pater was rather 
a psychologist, and it was through the effect of meta- 
physical ideas upon personality that he approached 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 165 

philosophy. He was not an abstract thinker ; he says, 
indeed, plainly, "Of course we are not naturally formed 
to love, or be interested in, or attracted towards, the 
abstract as such. . . . We cannot love or live upon genus 
and species, accident or substance, but for our minds, as 
for our bodies, need an orchard or a garden, with fruit 
and roses." But his psychology gave him the power of 
making metaphysics real to people who are not natur- 
ally metaphysical, by touching them with a personal 
appeal, and showing their ethical significance; he 
translates the pure thought of abstract thinkers into 
artistic and ethical values. It is interesting, for in- 
stance, to contrast his development with the develop- 
ment of such a man as Henry Sidgwick. Both were 
saved by the uneventful course of academic life from 
the pressure of hard facts and of social problems. Both 
began with a metaphysical and a literary bias; but 
Henry Sidgwick was fitted for abstract speculation, 
and the literary and artistic interests of his life tended 
to diminish; whereas in Pater's case the literary and 
artistic interests developed, and subordinated his meta- 
physical interests to his artistic prepossessions. 

In Plato and Platonism, then, Pater is absorbed in 
the task of bringing out the personality of Plato. 
This he does with singular skill. He shows that Plato 
was not an originator of philosophical thought; that 
it is the form and not the matter that is new; and 
that his charm lies in his romantic realism, his love 
of modest and ingenuous youth, his dramatic sense of 
character; so that, as Pater says, he had a resemblance 
to Thackeray, and was fully equipped to be a writer 
of noble fiction. He shows that Plato was in no sense 
a doctrinaire, but held that ideas and notions are not 
the consequence of reason but the cause of it. That 
they are there to be discovered, not non-existent and 



166 WALTER PATER [chap. 

capable of being originated; lie shows how Plato, in 
the Republic, was presenting philosophy as an essentially 
practical thing, a thing to mould life and conduct, an 
escape from the evils of the world — a religion, in fact, 
and not a philosophical system. Philosophy is, accord- 
ing to Plato, to teach us how to cultivate the qualities 
by which we can obtain a mastery over ourselves, how 
to arrive at a kind of musical proportion, the subordina- 
tion of the parts to the whole. " It is life itself," he 
says, " action and character, he proposes to colour ; to 
get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, 
that spirit of control, into the general course of life, 
above all into its energetic or impassioned acts." 

Thus Plato, according to Pater, is an advocate of 
the immutable, of law and principle. "Change is the 
irresistible law of our being. ... Change, he protests, 
through the power of a true philosophy, shall not be 
the law of our being." He shows that Plato was by 
constitution an emphatically sensuous nature, deeply 
sensible to impressions of beauty, and to emotional 
relations with others ; but that he regarded the appeal 
of the senses as a species of moral education; that the 
philosophical learner passed from the particular to the 
general, from the love of precise and personal beauty, 
to the love of the central and inner beauty. 

And thus Plato is not so much a teacher as a noble 
and inspiriting comrade ; those who love Plato do not 
sit at his feet and absorb his wisdom, but take service 
with him in his adventurous band, journeying from 
the familiar scene and the beloved home to the remote 
and distant mountains that close the horizon, but from 
which there may be a prospect of hidden lands. 

The whole book cannot be held to be exactly char- 
acteristic of Pater's deliberate style. It is composed 
not so much to embody his own dreams as to make a 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 167 

personality, an age, a spirit, clear to younger minds ; 
but there is a sense of a delighted zest, a blithe free- 
dom about it, as though it were the work of a mind 
which had escaped from tyrannical impulses and un- 
easy questionings into a gentle tranquillity of thought. 
One feels that not only is the subject dear to him, but 
that those whom he would address are also dear ; there 
is thus an affectionate solicitude, a buoyant easiness, 
about the book, as of a master speaking simply and 
unconstrainedly among a band of eager and friendly 
pupils. The book is full of echoes out of a well-filled 
mind, of Augustine and Dante, of Shakespeare and 
Wordsworth. Not only Plato himself, but the other 
incidental figures are brilliantly touched. Socrates, 
himself " rude and rough as some failure of his own 
old sculptor's workshop," yet " everywhere, with what 
is like a physical passion for what is, what is true — as 
one engaged in a sort of religious or priestly concen- 
tration of soul on what God really made and meant 
us to know" ; or Pythagoras, that distant legendary 
figure, with his strange glimpses of pre-existence, 
emerging as a brilliant, perhaps showy, personality, 
a mysterious or mystical thaumaturge, — these are 
sharply and definitely conceived. 

Again, there is a beautiful chapter on Lacedaemon, 
and the decorous, ordered, submissive system of the 
Dorians, which presented so strong a contrast to the 
diffuse, unregulated, brilliant spirit of Ionian com- 
munities. The Spartan theory of education, with its 
resemblance to our own English system, developing 
the individual only in order to subordinate him to the 
common welfare, repressing all eclectic, all independent 
qualities, had a potent attraction for Pater's mind, the 
attraction that all systems have that promise tran- 
quillity and settled instincts as a reward for obedience, 



168 WALTEE PATER [chap. 

for a mind that desires guidance, and to whom personal 
freedom has brought more anxiety than serenity. The 
high value of this chapter is that it contrives to invest 
a system which, barely and unsympathetically de- 
scribed, appears to be ineffably dreary and unpictu- 
resque, with the charm of cheerfulness and quietness so 
characteristic of communities of a monastic order, a 
cheerfulness which comes from the removal of personal 
responsibility, and the substitution of unquestioning 
obedience — that highest of all luxuries for indecisive 
and sensitive characters. 

The book, then, is a beautiful thing, with a sense of 
recovered youth blending with an older wisdom about 
it; a book admirably fitted to attract and instruct an 
ingenuous mind ; but lucid, interesting, and gracious as 
it is, Pater does not here emerge as the parfait prosateur, 
as Bourget called him ; it was no doubt the delight of 
feeling that in this book he had conferred a real educa- 
tional benefit upon those youthful spirits to whom his 
heart went out, that made him rate the book so highly. 
He did not feel so sure whither the artistic reveries, 
the metaphysical speculations, of his other works might 
conduct them ; but, for all that, criticism is right in 
setting a higher value upon his more intimate self- 
revelations, upon the books in which he uttered 
oracles, rather than on the book where he furthered 
knowledge. 

In the last year of Pater's life he published one of 
the Greek Studies — " The Age of Athletic Prizemen," 
which we have already considered, and two little 
sketches of travel — " Some Great Churches in France, " 
which appeared in the Nineteenth Century in March and 
June of that year. " Notre-Dame d' Amiens " is a fine 
study of a great church, dwelling on the lightness, the 
brightness, the " immense cheerfulness," of the building. 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 169 

The only very noteworthy passage is one in which 
he coDtrasts Greek and Gothic architecture. He says 
that in Gothic art "for the mere melody of Greek 
architecture, for the sense as it were of music in 
the opposition of successive sounds, you got harmony, 
the richer music generated by opposition of sounds 
in one and the same moment ; and were gainers " . . . 
" the vast complexity of the Gothic style seemed, 
as if consciously, to correspond to the richness, the 
expressiveness, the thousandfold influence, of the 
Catholic religion." 

Again in " Vezelay " (1894) we have a study in con- 
trast, of a " majestic, immoveable " church, which, with 
" its masses of almost unbroken masonry, its inertia" 
seems to have a certain kinship with imperial Kome. 
Its almost savage character, he says, is hardly relieved 
by a great band of energetic, realistic, coarsely exe- 
cuted sculpture, in which demons make merry over 
the punishment of wickedness : " Bold, crude, original, 
the work indicates delight in the power of repro- 
ducing fact, curiosity in it, but little or no sense of 
beauty." 

But the end was at hand, although there was no hint 
or foreshadowing of it. Never had Pater been more 
tranquil, serene, contented, than in these last months. 
Increasing years, without diminishing strength, concen- 
tration, or intellectual force, had brought him nothing 
but what was good ; the respect, the regard, the 
devotion, of friends ; the consciousness that he had 
now a perfect control of his art and its resources. He 
had many designs and schemes for books that should 
be written, and there seemed no reason why he should 
not have many years before him of simple life and con- 
genial activity ; and so we come to his last utterance. 

The essay on "Pascal" has a deep significance 



170 WALTER PATER [chap. 

among the writings of Pater ; it contains, thinly veiled 
under the gnise of criticism, some of his deepest 
thoughts on the great mystery of life — freewill and 
necessity — and his views of orthodox theology. It is 
true that he is nominally justifying Pascal and confut- 
ing the Jesuits ; but there is a passionate earnestness 
about his line of argument which shows only too clearly 
that he was doing what it suited his natural reticence 
to do — righting like Teucer under the shield of Ajax, 
and taking a part, an eager part, in the controversy 
between Liberalism and Authority. 

Moreover, it is his last work ; the work on which he 
was engaged in the last hours of his life ; the essay, in- 
deed, never received the last touches of that careful 
hand, and though substantially complete, it breaks off 
in the middle of a sentence. This fact — that it was 
his last deliberate utterance — gives it a special signifi- 
cance ; even before he had said his last word on the 
mystery of life, he knew all that there is to know. 

To take the theological side of the essay first, speak- 
ing of Pascal's half-contemptuous attempts to arrive at 
the true definition of theological phrases, Pater thus 
comments upon the situation: — 

"Pascal's charges are those which may seem to lie ready to 
hand against all who study theology, a looseness of thought 
and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making what 
are professedly very fine distinctions ; the insincerity with 
which terms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings ; 
the fatuity with which opposite meanings revolve into one 
another, in the strange vacuous atmosphere generated by 
professional divines." 

" The sin of the Jesuits," he says, " is above all that sin, 
unpardonable with men of the world sanspeur et sans reproclie, 
of a lack of self-respect, sins against pride, if the paradox may 
be allowed, all the undignified faults, in a word, of essentially 
little people when they interfere in great matters — faults 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 171 

promoted in the direction of the consciences of women and 
children, weak concessions to weak people who want to be 
saved in some easy way, quite other than Pascal's high, fine, 
chivalrous way of gaining salvation." 

In these words breathes the accent of the liberal 
spirit, the spirit which dares to look close into great 
questions; declines to admit more than it can prove, 
or at least infer; refuses, at whatever loss of serenity, 
to formulate its hopes and desires as certainties. 

The Jesuit doctrine of sufficient grace is that grace 
is always vouchsafed in sufficient measure to overcome 
temptation, if only the spirit chooses to make use of it 
by the exercise of its free choice. 

"This doctrine," says Pater, "is certainly, to use the 
familiar expression, a very pleasant doctrine conducive to 
the due feeding of the whole flock of Christ, as being, as 
assuming them to be, what they really are, at the worst, 
God's silly sheep." 

Pater goes on to say, wdth an outspokenness which, 
is hardly characteristic of him, that the very opposite 
doctrine, the Calvinistic doctrine of election both to 
reprobation and to salvation, would seem to be strik- 
ingly confirmed by our own experience. Pascal him- 
self, a visibly elect soul, acting as it were by a certain 
irresistible impulse of holiness, is an instance in point. 

He makes, of course, no attempt at the solution of 
the insoluble difficulty. But nowhere else in the whole 
of his writings does he touch, on the great dilemma, 
namely, that our consciousness tells us we are free, our 
reason that we are bound. He only surveys it from 
the spectatorial point of view. 

" Who," he says, "on a survey of life from outside would 
willingly lose the dramatic contrasts, the alternating interests, 



172 WALTER PATER [chap. 

for which the opposed ideas of freedom and necessity are our 
respective points of view?" 

But Pater leaves us in little doubt as to the side on 
which his own heart was engaged. It is clear that he 
felt that we are not, when our humanity is sifted to 
the very bottom, independent beings; we are deeply 
involved and hampered ; something outside of us and 
anterior to us determines our bent, our very path. 

This last deep \ utterance of Pater's has a strange 
significance when taken side by side with the fact so 
often stated that he was thinking of the possibility 
of receiving Anglican ordination. There could not 
possibly be a greater mistake than this supposition. 
Perhaps, indeed, there was a region of his mind in 
which the idea appealed to him, but deeper down, 
in a secret chamber of thought, which in his writings 
at all events he did not often visit, lay that con- 
sciousness of the hard, dark, bare truth which, if a 
man once truly apprehends, prevents him from figuring 
as a partisan, except through a certain sophistry, on 
the side of authoritative religion. 

This is the truth, disguise it as we will, that 
religion in its purest form is not a solution of the 
world's mystery, but a working theory of morals. 
For all religions, even Christianity itself, tend to 
depend upon certain assumptions, such as the con- 
tinuance, in some form or other, of our personal 
identity after death, of which no scientific evidence 
is forthcoming. We may assume it, yielding to a 
passionate intuition, but nothing can prevent it from 
being an assumption, an intuition, which may per- 
haps transcend reason, but cannot wholly satisfy it. 
And thus, however impassioned, however transcendent 
that intuition may be, there must always remain a 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 173 

certain element of doubt, in all sincere minds, as to 
the absolute certainty of the assumption. Thus there 
must lie, in all reasoning men's hearts, a streak of 
agnosticism. The triumph of faith can never, until 
faith melts into certainty, be of the same quality as 
the triumph of reason ; and it is upon the proportion 
of doubt to faith in any man's mind that his religious 
attitude depends. There is little question as to which 
way Pater's sympathies and hopes inclined ; but this 
essay clearly reveals that the doubt was there. 

He touches with deep sympathy the strange and sad 
withdrawal of Pascal from the world; his attempt, 
under the pressure of a painful and unmanning dis- 
ease, to find solace in asceticism, renunciation, and the 
practice of austere pieties ; it seems strange to Pater 
to find that Pascal never fell under the aesthetic 
charm of the rites of the Catholic Church, but found 
"a certain weariness, a certain puerility, a certain 
unprofitableness, in them." "He seems," he adds, 
" to have little sense of the beauty of holiness," but 
to be absorbed by a "sombre, trenchant, precipitous 
philosophy." 

He treats of Pascal from the literary side with a 
whole-hearted admiration. He says that he made the 
French language "as if by a new creation, what it 
has remained — a pattern of absolutely unencumbered 
expressiveness." He dwells on the fragrant charm, the 
naturalness, of the Letters, proceeding from one who was 
hardly a student, knowing but two or three great 
books. And the Pensees he considers to be pure inspir- 
ations "penetrating what seemed hopelessly dark." 
How could the Pense'es be more nobly summarised than 
as " those great fine sayings which seem to betray by 
their depth of sound the vast unseen hollow places of 
nature, of humanity, just beneath one's feet " ? They 



174 WALTER PATER [chap. 

seem to him to combine faultless expression, perfect 
economy of statement, marvellous suggestiveness, with 
a " somewhat Satanic intimacy " with the weaknesses 
of the human heart. 

What kept Pascal from scepticism, or, rather, what 
threw him into religion, was a bewildered, a terrified 
apprehension of the strange inconsistency of human 
nature, the blending of meanness and greatness which 
everywhere appears. 

We may consider this essay, then, as Pater's most 
deliberate utterance on ethical things. It reveals him, 
I think, as a deep though unwilling sceptic ; it shows 
a soul athirst yet unsatisfied; it shows that the 
region of beauty, both in art and religion, in which 
he strove to live, was but an outer paradise in which 
he found what peace he could ; but in the innermost 
shrine all is dark and still. 

On leaving London, Pater had settled, in 1893, in a 
house in St. Giles', Oxford. It is a quiet house with 
a plastered front of some antiquity, with a pleasant 
row of trees in front of it ; at the left is a little passage 
leading to the back of the house. The inner arch is 
surmounted with a quaint carved face. Here he settled 
with his sisters in great contentment. 

The President of Magdalen, Mr. T. H. Warren, 
speaking of the later Oxford days, writes : — 

" One would have said that there was a kind of placid piety, 
an inner content, which somehow manifested itself in him. 
He did not talk a great deal, yet always enough. What I 
think struck me most about him was a sort of gentleness in his 
whole manner, in perception and predilection, almost at times 
a softness, — and yet it was balanced by hardness of decision 
too. He was a very familiar figure, with his pale face, strong 
jaw, heavy, chopped, German-looking moustache, tall hat and 
apple-green tie. He was often seen walking, and latterly he 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 175 

rather laboured in his walk, which gave, rightly or wrongly, 
the idea of conscious or half -conscious suffering. ... At the 
Dante Society he did not say much, but what always struck 
me was that he spoke with a certain authority and a strong 
common sense ; and, moreover, with what appeared a personal 
and natural knowledge of what a poet or a literary artist in 
his temperament and habits really is. . . . 

" It seemed to me that he cultivated a wise, grave passive- 
ness, a gentle susceptibility, a kind of soft impressionability; 
that he tried to keep, and did keep, a sort of bloom upon his 
mind. I never remember a single unkind criticism or remark. 
. . . My opinion of him is rather an impression than an 
opinion, and that is, I think, what he would himself have 
wished — and what is fairest too. 

" Can I put it in a few words ? He expressed life for him- 
self and to others in terms of sensations, of impressions. These 
he might analyse, combine, and re-combine, but together they 
formed his working synthesis. I did not really know him in 
the earlier days, when in his written work the sensuousness 
and the ref erability of everything to sensation was so avowed. 
I only knew him well much later when he had become a kind 
of quietist : what the real man was I could not say." 

In the spring of 1894 Pater went to Glasgow to 
receive the honorary degree of LL.D., a little piece of 
recognition which pleased him, and took the oppor- 
tunity of visiting some of the Northern Cathedrals. 
In the summer of the same year he was for the first 
time in his life seriously ill. He had an attack of 
rheumatic fever and was confined to his bed. But he 
made an apparent recovery, and became convalescent. 
He was allowed to leave his bed and come down- 
stairs. He was full of cheerfulness and interest, 
though lie was feeling weak; it is certain, however, 
that there was something organically wrong, though 
he allowed himself, with the instinct of one who 
enjoyed the ordinary routine of life to the full, and 
who was impatient of invalid conditions, to resume 



176 WALTER PATER [chap. 

his activities too soon. Still there seemed no reason 
to suppose that he was acting imprudently. He 
was working at the lecture on Pascal, which was to 
have been delivered in July, when, in consequence of 
writing too near to an open window, he had an attack 
of pleurisy, which still further reduced his strength. 
Again he became convalescent, and left his room on 
July 29 without ill effects. But on the morning of 
Monday, July 30, 1894, at ten o'clock, on coming down- 
stairs, he had a sudden attack of heart failure, and 
died apparently without suffering. If he had lived five 
days longer he would have completed his fifty-fifth 
year. He was buried in the Holywell cemetery at 
Oxford, in the presence of many of his old friends. It 
is melancholy to feel that in all probability his life 
might have been prolonged for some years, if he had 
but realised how much reduced in strength he was. 
But it was the happiest kind of end that could befall 
a man of Pater's sensitive and apprehensive tempera- 
ment. He had always, from his earliest years, been 
much preoccupied with the thought of death, and 
even with the effort to reconcile himself to it. It was 
strange and beautiful that it should, after all, have 
befallen him so quietly and simply. He felt no shadow 
of death, no mournful forebodings of mortality. He 
had won a secure fame, he was surrounded with re- 
spect and affection, he had fulfilled in patience and 
with much quiet happiness a great task; and so with 
no decay of faculty, no diminution of zest and en- 
thusiasm, no melancholy foreboding, death came to 
him as a quiet friend and beckoned him smilingly 
away. 

Yet as we realise that this wistful, this inquisitive 
spirit had indeed drawn near to the gate, through 
which he had seen others pass, had indeed endured the 



vi.] LATER WRITINGS 177 

passage, upon the incidents and impressions of which 
he had often meditated with an intense and reverent 
curiosity, the imagination torments and perplexes itself 
with the wonder as to what the end or the awakening 
may have been, whether indeed he ever knew, in some 
moment of swimming gaze and darkened eyes, that 
he should not return to life and daylight. We find 
our minds dwelling upon the words with which he 
ended the finest of all his essays, that on " Leonardp 
da Vinci," written twenty-five years before. We lose 
ourselves " in speculating how one who had been al- 
ways so desirous of beauty, but desired it always in 
such definite and precise forms, as hands or flowers 
or hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and 
experienced the last curiosity," 






CHAPTER VII 

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 

In younger days Pater was refined and dignified 
in appearance ; there is an early photograph of him, 
shortly after he took his degree, with a soft eye, a 
serious gentle look, with regular and rounded features. 1 
But this altered in later years ; he became graver and 
heavier of aspect, and his face took on a character 
that has been described as " Japanese " ; the pallor of 
his complexion, like old ivory, became more marked ; 
but his eyes were his most eloquent feature, of a light 
hazel tint, almost grey-green, which lit up with an 
impressive light of animation and kindness when he 
was moved. 

He was in later life slow of movement, bent, sad 
of aspect, except when particularly stirred, and 
somewhat sedentary in appearance. Yet he was 
broad-shouldered, strongly-built, sturdy, and gave an 
impression of soundness, and even toughness of con- 
stitution. His great pale face, with the strong lower 
jaw and carefully trimmed moustache, gave him some- 
thing of the air of a retired military man. There 
was an impression sometimes of languor about him. 
He had to strangers, at first sight, in later years, a 

1 There is a portrait of him, a drawing hy Simeon Solomon, 
made in 1872, now in the possession of Mr. Herbert Home. 
There is also another drawing, a lithograph, by Mr. Ro then- 
stein, included in the Oxford Portraits. Neither of these is con- 
sidered wholly satisfactory by those who knew Pater best. 

178 



chap, vil] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 179 

fatigued, faded, lustreless air, as of a caged creature. 
But this, I learn from those who knew him best, was 
in reality a false impression. He was undoubtedly 
robust; he was a patient, an unwearying traveller, 
often walking long distances without fatigue, and bear- 
ing uncomplainingly the extreme of Italian heat. But, 
like all impressionable, perceptive, artistic tempera- 
ments, his physical strength was apt to ebb and flow 
with his inner mood ; when he was pleased, interested, 
delighted, he was also equable, animated, alert. When 
he was aware that he was expected to fulfil anticipa- 
tions, conscious of social strain, uninterested, he be- 
came melancholy, drooping, unstrung. To any one 
introduced to him for the first time he at once gave the 
impression of great gentleness and sympathy. There 
was nothing awe-inspiring about him but his reputa- 
tion. His low deferential voice, his shy smile, the 
delicate phrasing of his sentences, his obvious interest 
in the temperament of his companion, gave the feeling 
of great and sincere humility. He was, too, singularly 
easy and accessible ; he had no desire to keep a con- 
versation in his own hands, or to claim attention for 
his opinions. He had rather a delicate power of 
encouraging confidence and frankness. One realised 
at once that one was in the presence of a man of 
subtle sensibilities, anxious, not of set purpose but 
from considerate instinct, to do the fullest justice to 
the feelings of his companion, and to give him his 
undivided attention. This came from a fine simplicity 
of nature, from a character that made no egotistical 
demands ; he seemed to expect and to require little 
from life, but to be full of a quiet gratitude for such 
delight as came naturally in his way. 

He arrayed himself with scrupulous neatness, and 
always dressed for Hall. He invariably wore a tall 



180 WALTER PATER [chap. 

hat, and carried the neatest of gold-topped umbrellas. 
His gait was peculiar : he had a slight stoop, and 
dragged one foot slightly, advancing with a certain 
delicacy. He disliked stopping to talk to people, and 
often was at some pains not to appear to recognise 
them ; he had a peculiar courteous gesture of the 
hand, if recognition was inevitable, by which he paid 
a certain tribute of courtesy, and yet contrived to in- 
dicate that he wished to be unmolested. He was shy 
in large mixed assemblies, but his shyness did not 
make him silent or abrupt. He was apt to talk, gently 
and persistently, of trivial topics, using his conversa- 
tion rather as a shield against undue intimacy. 

People on first meeting him were sometimes struck 
with the extraordinary conventionality of his manners 
and conversation in society ; but this almost oppres- 
sive suavity melted into a gentle and sympathetic 
kindness on further acquaintance. A friend, writing 
to Miss Pater after her brother's death, spoke of 

"his kindness, his sweetness, his gentle and amiable wearing 
of all his great gifts, his happy and gracious willingness to 
give all around him the enjoyment of them." 

Another friend of his writes : — 

"The only attitude I ever observed in Pater, the only 
mood I saw him in, was a sort of weary courtesy with which 
he used to treat me, with somehow a deep kindness shining 
through. It was as though he would have liked to lavish 
sympathy and even affection, but was frightened of the re- 
sponsibility and unequal to the effort. He seemed to me, if 
I may use an allegory, to point to a sack of treasure, and 
say, — < That is yours, if you like to take it ; I am only sorry 
that I am too tired myself to rise and place it in your 
hands.' " 

But, on the other hand, Dr. Bussell, the closest com- 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 181 

pardon in the later years, writes of the side of himself 
that Pater turned to the nearer circle : — 

"His ordinary talk . . . was the happiest blending of 
seriousness and mirth, of deep feeling and a sort of childlike 
glee in the varying surfaces of things." 

This subdued air came to a certain extent from the 
circumstances of his life, but still more from a deep- 
seated reclusiveness, rather than humility of nature. 
Indeed, it may be said that, with all his gentleness, he 
was not innately humble. What often appeared to 
be humility was, in reality, an intense dislike of 
opposition. A consciousness of antagonism irritated 
him so intensely, that he often preferred to withdraw 
both what he had said and written, rather than pro- 
voke contradiction and argument. It was not that he 
was diffident about his intuitions ; he was rather 
diffident about his power of defending and recommend- 
ing them. He was little inclined to dogmatise, and 
realised most sympathetically the differences of tem- 
perament ; but the path which he had chosen was the 
only path for him ; and though he might seem to yield 
to argument and remonstrance, he was never con- 
verted, except by reflection. He was probably never 
fully appreciated at Oxford. Busy, effective, academi- 
cal natures tended to think of him as a secluded 
dreamer of dreams ; his fame grew so insensibly and 
secretly, and was, even so, confined so much to the 
crvverol, the connoisseurs, that there never came that 
revulsion of feeling that has sometimes lifted a man 
suddenly on to a pinnacle of unquestioned reputation. 
Moreover, it is fair to say that the air of the Univer- 
sities is not at the present moment favourable to the 
pursuit of belles lettres and artistic philosophies. The 
praise of academical circles is reserved at the present 



182 WALTER PATER [chap. 

time for people of brisk bursarial and business qualifi- 
cations, for men of high technical accomplishment, 
for exact researchers, for effective teachers of pre- 
scribed subjects, for men of acute and practical minds, 
rather than for men of imaginative qualities. This is 
the natural price that must be paid for the increased 
efficiency of our Universities, though it may be 
regretted that they maintain so slight a hold upon the 
literary influences of the day. The whole atmosphere 
is, in fact, sternly critical, and the only work which 
is emphatically recognised and approved is the work 
which makes definite and unquestionable additions to 
the progress of exact sciences. 

A genial epigrammatist once said that if a man 
desired to court unpopularity in academical circles he 
had but to enjoy an outside reputation, to write a good 
literary style, and to make it his business to see some- 
thing of undergraduates, to gain his end with entire 
celerity. 

There is some truth in the contention. The erudite 
world is apt to think that a reputation acquired with 
the general public by literaiy accomplishments is a 
second-rate sort of affair, and only to be gained by 
those who are not sufficiently hard-headed and exact 
to win academical repute. A man, too, who betrays 
an interest in the younger members of the community 
is thought to be slightly abnormal, and either to be 
actuated by a vague sentimentality, or else to be 
desirous of receiving the admiration of immature 
minds, which he cannot win from more mature 
intellects. 

This atmosphere, these conditions, Pater accepted 
with the gentle outward deference that was character- 
istic of him ; he had no taste for the warm luxuriance 
of coteries ; he had no sort of desire to label with 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 183 

contemptuous names those who must have appeared to 
him deaf and blind to the subtle and beautiful effects 
that made the substance of his own life. 

It seemed a curious irony of fate which planted 
Pater in a college which for years enjoyed a robust 
pre-eminence for athletic triumphs, together with a 
reputation for wholesale turbulence. But it may be 
said that such an atmosphere was not wholly un- 
congenial to Pater. Though he had no sort of pro- 
ficiency in athletics, and though he was pre-eminently 
peaceable in disposition, he had, as I have said, a genuine 
and deep admiration for strongly developed physical 
vigour, while he had little of the sensitive disciplinary 
instinct that feels the frank display of youthful ebulli- 
ence a kind of slur upon the privileges of constituted 
authority. No one was more anxious than Pater, in 
a disciplinary crisis, to give a case a fair hearing, and 
to condone as far as possible an outbreak that was 
thoughtless rather than deliberate. In all cases where 
there was a question of the infliction of punishment for 
some breach of discipline, Pater was always on the 
side of mercy. And this was with no wish to preserve 
his own dignity by temporising with the disorderly 
section. He was always a loyal and faithful supporter 
of authority, while he was anxious that a case should 
not be judged with the undue sternness that the sense 
of outraged dignity tends to bring with it. As Dr. 
Bus sell wrote : — 

" Naturally inclined to a certain rigour in discipline, he 
was full of excuse for individual cases ; and regretted and 
thought over stern measures more than most members of a 
governing body can afford to do." 

Apocryphal stories are related of him, such as his 
excuse for the rowdiness of undergraduates after 



184 WALTER PATER [chap. 

Hall, that they reminded him of playful young tigers 
that had just been fed ; or his supposed remark about 
bonfires in Brasenose quad, that he did not object 
to them because they lighted up the spire of St. Mary's 
so beautifully. These were, of course, intended to 
represent the imperturbable search for beautiful im- 
pressions in the most incongruous circumstances ; 
but they represent, too, a half-truth, namely, a real 
and vital charity of nature, inclined to condone, and 
even to sympathise with, the manifestations of natural 
feeling, however personally inconvenient. 

Perhaps the playful irony, the light-handed humour, 
which was to Pater a deliberate shield against the 
roughness of the world, tended to obscure his deep 
seriousness of nature, his devotedly religious spirit. 
He sympathised, it is true, with all humanity with a 
largeness which is surprising in a man of such sensi- 
tive and secluded constitution. He had a deter- 
mination, remarkable in a man of delicate organisa- 
tion, to see the world as it really was, to admire 
what was vigorous and natural and vital in it. He 
had no wish to create for himself an unreal paradise, 
to suppose the world to be other than it appeared, or 
to drown the insistent cries that reached him in a web 
of blurred impression or uncertain sound. He admired 
what was joyful and brave and strong. Had he been 
of a more alert physical constitution he would have 
thrown himself, we may safely assert, into the pursuit 
of athletics ardently and eagerly. As he could not, 
he contented himself with admiring the youthful 
exuberance of activity, and, true to his nature, with dis- 
entangling as far as he could the fibre of beauty which 
ran for him through the universe. But in all this he 
was akin and not alien to the insouciant and pleasure- 
loving spirit of youth. 



vn.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 185 

He was by nature an extremely reticent man; he 
never seemed to think that his ideas were likely 
to command attention or his personality to cause 
interest. He wrote very few letters and never kept a 
diary. His whole attitude to the world and its con- 
cerns was the attitude of a spectator, and even his 
closest and nearest relationships with others could 
not win him from his isolation; he could be kind, 
courteous, considerate, and sincere; but he could not 
be intimate; he always guarded his innermost heart. 

He was very loath to express his own personal 
view of a matter, especially if it involved taking any 
credit to himself. But a friend remembers that he was 
once talking of the artistic perceptions of Buskin, and 
said suddenly with a show of impatience, " I cannot 
believe that Buskin saw more in the church of St. Mark 
than I do." 

His courteous deference, to both old and young alike, 
was very remarkable. He would agree gently with the 
crudest expressions of opinion, "No doubt! I had 
never thought of it in that light!" But he could 
occasionally fire up when some deeply felt opinion of 
his own was challenged. Mr. Ainslie remembers being 
in his company when some one spoke disparagingly of 
Flaubert. He came suddenly out of his shell, and 
spoke with great emotion and much wealth of illus- 
tration. 

Though Pater was never unkind, he could give a 
pungent judgment on occasions. The conversation, in 
his presence, had once turned upon H. A. J. Munro, 
and a man was mentioned with whom Munro was 
intimate, and with whom he often associated, who was 
distinguished rather for a mundane interest in affairs 
and for a devotion to sociable and convivial enjoyment 
than for any interest in literature or scholarship. 



186 WALTER PATER [chap. 

Surprise was expressed at this friendship. "I should 
not have thought they had anything in common," said 
one of those present. "Do you think that is so?" 
said Pater. " I always felt that there was a good deal 
of the mahogany-table element in Munro." This is a 
just judgment which, though ironically expressed, ex- 
hibits a considerable penetration on the part of 
Pater, in the case of a man of whom he knew but 
little. 

He was extraordinarily loyal to his friends. He 
spoke once with great gravity and seriousness of one 
whom he had known, whom he thought to be drifting 
into dangerous courses, and expressed a deep desire 
to help or warn him, or, at all events, to get a warning 
conveyed to him. His confidant tells me that he never 
saw him so deeply moved and distressed as on this 
occasion, as he tried to devise some way of bring- 
ing conviction home to the unhappy object of his 
anxiety. 

His tendency indeed was always to mitigate harsh 
judgments, to appreciate the good points of those with 
whom he was brought into contact. He had indeed a 
great eye for little individualities and peculiarities, with 
a gentle enjoyment of the manifestation of foibles; but 
it was always an indulgent and a tender attitude. 
And it may be said that it is rare to find one so per- 
ceptive of the most delicate and subtle shades of 
temperament; who was yet so uniformly charitable 
and kind, so determined to see the best side of every 
one. 

Pater kept himself severely aloof from the current 
thought of the day, but with characteristic reticence 
never adopted the position of an opponent. He took 
no interest in scientific movements or discoveries, and 
merely left such questions alone. 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 187 

In politics he was what may be called an old- 
fashioned Liberal. His view of the scheme of Govern- 
ment, the movement of political forces and economical 
problems, was dim. He took no real interest in such 
matters, as lying outside of his circle. He rarely com- 
mitted himself to any statements on political matters; 
but he had a dislike to Napoleon m., and once said 
with some animus, " I hope we shall soon arrive at a 
time when no one will be so vulgar as to want to go 
and live at the Tuileries." His interest was all in 
detail and external values. " I am quite tired," he said 
once, " of hearing people for ever talking of the causes 
which led to the French Ee volution; I don't want to 
know. I am all for details. I want to know how 
people lived, what they wore, what they looked like. " 

He had no personal ambition, no desire for recog- 
nition. He never paid visits, and took no trouble to 
make the acquaintance of literary men, even at a 
time when his reputation would have secured him 
warm welcome and distinguished respect. He stayed 
at Oxford because he thought that the life there 
gave him the best opportunity of doing the quiet, 
thorough work which he felt himself most capable of 
performing. He had a deep sense of responsibility, 
though he did not willingly assume it, and felt bound 
to exercise his special faculties to the uttermost, and 
to give liberally of his sympathy. 

It is clear that Pater changed very much as the 
years went on ; after his silent and reserved boyhood 
and youth, he had a period of 6panouissement, when 
the ideas that began to crowd thickly into his mind 
produced a certain want of balance, a paradoxical dar- 
ing of speech, a certain recklessness of statement; 
this was no doubt enhanced by the discovery that he 
could hold his own in a brilliant society, that he had 



188 WALTER PATER [chap. 

quick perceptions and conversational gifts ; and at 
this period he tasted the pleasures of effective talk, 
the intellectual delight of the process which is best 
described by the old homely proverb of saying Bo ! 
to geese. In these days he desired to be impressive 
rather than to be sympathetic ; but as his character 
deepened and widened, through perception and in- 
sight, through friendship and misunderstanding alike, 
he reverted more to what was really the basis of his 
character, the desire for simple and affectionate com- 
panionship. He was condemned by temperament to 
a certain isolation ; he was outside the world and not 
of it. A happy marriage might have brought him 
more into line with humanity ; but his genius was 
for friendship rather than for love, and his circum- 
stances and environment were favourable to celibacy ; 
and thus he passed through life in a certain mystery, 
though the secret is told for those who can read it in 
his writings. Art demands certain sacrifices, and the 
price that an artist pays for the sorrowful great gift 
is apt to be a heavy one. Pater paid it to the full, 
and paid it ungrudgingly; he found, he followed 
his true life, through dark and lonely windings ; he 
emerged into the free air and the sun, though he bore 
upon him the marks of the conflict ; and his place is 
with the sons of art who have used faithfully and joy- 
fully the gift committed to their keeping. 

That the inner and deeper current of Pater's thought 
was profoundly serious is only too plain from his 
books ; such humour as is here not infrequently intro- 
duced is of a delicate kind, often almost mournfully 
disguised; the same kind of humour that one may 
sometimes discern in the glance of a sympathetic 
friend when some mirth-provoking incident occurs at 
a solemn ceremony at which it is essential to pre- 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 189 

serve a dignity of deportment. At such moments a 
look of silent and rapturous appreciation may pass 
between two kindred spirits ; such, in its fineness and 
secrecy, is the humour of Pater's writings, and pre- 
supposes a sympathetic understanding between writer 
and reader. 

Dr. Bussell, writing of the apparent contrast between 
the solemnity of his writings and his demeanour to his 
closest friends, writes : — 

"To a certain extent, but to a certain extent only, these 
(writings) may be taken as an index to his character, as un- 
veiling the true man. But to those who knew him as he 
lived among us here, they seemed a sort of disguise. There 
was the same tenderness, the same tranquillising repose, about 
his conversation that we find in his writings; the same care- 
fulness in trifles, and exactness of expression. But his writ- 
ten works betray little trace of that childlike simplicity, that 
naive joyousness, that never-wearying pleasure in animals 
and their ways, — that grave yet half -amused seriousness, also 
childlike, in which he met the events of the daily routine." 

Those who did not know him personally have sup- 
posed him to be a man of a strained and affected 
solemnity. The exact opposite was the truth. Pater 
did not despise the day of small things. He loved 
easy talk and simple laughter. He had a relish for 
small jokes. He loved plays that made him laugh. 
Such performances as Gilbert and Sullivan's operas 
were his delight, and a friend who accompanied him 
to Euddigore said that it was delightful to see the 
whole-hearted and childlike enjoyment to which he 
surrendered himself. Mr. Gosse went with him to Mr. 
Pinero's Magistrate, and remembers him convulsed 
with overwhelming laughter. In his own home he 
used to discourse with intense gravity, mingled with 
great bursts of laughter, of the adventures of a set 



190 WALTER PATER [chap. 

of entirely fictitious relatives. Again, he took a de- 
lighted pleasure in the ways and mannerisms of his 
acquaintances. Mr. G-osse remembers how admirably 
he used to imitate Mark Pattison's speech and peevish 
intonation. This was best exemplified in the imaginary 
dialogue which Pater used to render, supposed to take 
place between the Eector of Lincoln and a burglar who 
had invaded his house : " I am a poor old man. Look 
at me, you can see that I am a very poor man. Go 
across to Fowler — he is rich, and all his plate is real. 
He is a very snug fellow, Fowler ! " This was a really 
admirably dramatic performance, so dramatic that 
Pater appeared to be quite convinced of its truth. 

Pater had an unceasing delight in watching the ways 
and habits of pet animals. His own domestic cats, 
indeed, were kept and lovingly tended, till from age 
and disease they had nearly lost all semblance to the 
feline form. He was deeply conscious of the charm 
of seeing these bright creatures so close at hand, with 
the extraordinary relation that may exist, such perfect 
confidence, such unrestrained affection, while yet there 
is no communication of thought, and so little compre- 
hension on either side of what is really passing in the 
mind. He was strangely attracted by the mysterious 
tie, so close and, in a way, so intimate, and yet with 
so little mutual understanding, and accompanied by 
such isolation. He was particularly fond of cats, their 
dainty ways, their graceful attitudes ; and aware too 
of the refined selfishness, so different from the eager 
desire to please of the dog ; the cat, intent on its own 
business, using human beings to minister to its needs, 
making its own arrangements, giving or withholding 
its company, with no idea of obedience or subservience 
or dependence ; but just living gracefully and indo- 
lently in the houses of men, because it suits its con- 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 191 

venience to do so. All this, together with its dramatic 
mystery, its intent secretiveness, its whimsical mirth, 
its charming solemnity, had an unfailing pleasure for 
Pater. He was always strangely drawn too, with a 
mixture of curiosity and indignation, by the sight of 
those collections of incongruous animals known as 
Happy Families that are to be seen in gregarious 
resorts ; he would linger about them, expressing his 
indignation, yet always ending by contributing liber- 
ally to their maintenance. 

In conversation, especially in earlier days, Pater 
adopted a consistent and deliberate irony of speech 
which was such as often to baffle even his intimate 
friends. He delighted in paradox, and in a kind of 
whimsical perversity. He would dwell upon the un- 
essential attributes of a scene, a personality, a book, 
when a serious judgment was desired. And this, com- 
bined as it was with a serious, grave, and almost 
gloomy manner, completed the mystification. 

He was fond, as I have said, of insisting upon some 
altogether unimportant detail on these occasions ; he 
used to pretend that he shut his eyes in crossing Swit- 
zerland, on his journeys to and from Italy, so as not to 
see the " horrid pots of blue paint," as he called the 
Swiss lakes. He would profess himself unable to read 
the books of a person whose name or personal appear- 
ance distressed him. The celebrated story, which is 
widely current about him as to the examination in 
which he took a part, is characteristic of the same 
mood. He was supposed to have looked over a paper, 
but when the examiners met he seemed to have kept 
no record of his impressions ; to assist his recollection 
the names of the candidates were read over, but he 
seemed to be unable to connect any ideas with any of 
them until the name Sanctuary appeared, at which he 



192 WALTER PATER [chap. 

visibly brightened, and said that he was now sure he 
had looked over the papers because he remembered 
that he liked the name. 

Probably the habit arose from the fact that he was 
of a shy and sensitive temperament, and that to give 
a real and serious opinion was a trial to him. He dis- 
liked the possibility of dissent or disapproval, and 
took refuge in this habit of irony, so as to baffle his 
hearers and erect a sort of fence between them and 
his own personality. 

But partly too he was undoubtedly aware, in his 
earlier days, that the expectation of conversational 
friandises amused and delighted his hearers. He was 
rather the spoilt child of the intellectual circle in 
which he lived, and it is held by some that he rather 
presumed on the indulgence of his friends in this 
respect. 

Mr. Basil Champneys, for instance, recollects how 
he was dining in company with Pater at Professor 
Bywater's, about the year 1875, with a small party. 
The conversation turned on George Eliot, and Pater 
announced that he did not think much of George Eliot 
as a writer. " It is impossible," he said, " to value a 
writer all of whose characters are practically identical. 
What," he said, " is Maggie Tulliver but Tito in 
petticoats ? " Such a criticism is of course purely 
perverse, and contains no germ of critical seriousness. 

The same tendency is reflected in the peevish mono- 
logue, attributed by tradition to Mark Pattison, and 
often delightedly repeated by Pater himself. The 
question of possible travelling-companions was being 
discussed, when the Kector broke out with : " I would 
not travel with Pater for anything ! He would say the 
steamboat was not a steamboat, and that Calais was 
not Calais ! " 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 193 

The example that he set was somewhat contagious. 
Those affected by it became the most subjective of 
critics, and acquired the superficial conversational 
method, which consisted in speaking of serious things 
on social occasions as if they had no seriousness, and 
of diligently searching for the ridiculous aspect that 
they could be found to bear. There came a certain 
reaction at a later date against this style of con- 
versation, until the flippant treatment of topics, how- 
ever superficially amusing, came to be regarded with 
perhaps undue impatience. But the fact remains that 
Pater was in ordinary talk, through early years, un vrai 
moqueur, while the seriousness of his demeanour lent 
a certain piquancy to his paradoxical talk which had a 
distinct charm. In this respect, indeed, the caricature 
of Pater in the pages of the New Republic gives an 
entirely wrong impression. In the New Republic Mr. 
Kose is made to talk as though he were uttering his 
secret thoughts, dicenda tacenda locutus, with entire 
indifference to the tone of the audience that sur- 
rounded him. This is a hopeless misconception of 
Pater's ordinary ways. 

There are two or three anecdotes which survive 
which aptly illustrate the same tendency. I do not 
know to what extent these reminiscences are coloured 
")y the legendary element, but they are contemporary 
stories which have survived, and are therefore worth 
repeating. He was asked, for instance, whether he did 
not find his College work a great burden to him. He 
replied with inimitable gravity, " Well, not so much as 
you might think. The fact is that most of our men 
are fairly well-to-do, and it is not necessary that they 
should learn very much. At some Colleges I am told 
that certain of the young men have a genuine love for 
learning; if that were so here, it would be quite 
o 



194 WALTER PATER [chap. 

too dreadful." He sighed, and looked sadly at his 
auditor. 

On another occasion it is said that, when advising a 
man what to read for Greats, Pater said : " I cannot 
advise you to read any special books ; the great thing is 
to read authors whole ; read Plato whole ; read Kant 
whole ; read Mill whole" 

Again, though the following is probably to be re- 
garded as legendary, it is said that he once, in a 
lecture, announced that in certain aspects we might 
be justified in regarding religion as a beautiful disease. 
This remark was quoted by an undergraduate to his 
parent with the substitution of the word " loathsome " 
for "beautiful." The parent wrote indignantly to 
Pater to ask if it was right that such opinions should 
be expressed by a tutor to undergraduates. Pater, 
according to his own account, replied that he did not 
think he could have used the word "loathsome." 
He might, he said, have used the word " beautiful " — 
"a beautiful disease." "The parent," he added, "ex- 
pressed himself entirely reassured and satisfied by the 
explanation." 1 

He went to see a rather elderly game of hockey 
played by middle-aged performers, and, after a moment 
of silence, said softly to his companion : "Come away ; 
I think we ought to go on; it seems hardly fair to 
look at them." 

But the habit of indulging in ironical or reckless 
paradox had its dangerous side. There was at Oxford 
in the days of Pater's early residence a certain aesthetic 

1 The origin of this story is no doubt to be found on page 217 of 
the 1889 edition of the Appreciations, in the suppressed essay- 
on "Aesthetic Poetry." "That monastic religion of the Middle 
Age was, in fact, in many of its bearings, like a beautiful dis- 
ease or disorder of the senses." 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 195 

movement, a species of renaissance, in which the creed 
of beauty was strongly insisted upon. In some members 
of the circle that was thus affected, this resulted in much 
extravagance of thought; and in some it had even 
worse results in loosening the principles of morality, 
and judging action by the canons of what was held to be 
beautiful. It is a difficult subject to treat discreetly, 
because the epigoni of the school, in certain notorious 
instances, ended in complete moral and social shipwreck. 
With the extravagances and excesses of the school it 
is needless to say that Pater, a man of scrupulous con- 
science and a high standard of moral delicacy, had not 
the slightest sympathy ; but his love of paradox, his 
recklessness of irony, unquestionably led him to say 
things which could be unhappily distorted and mis- 
applied, and which, not in his own case, but in the case 
of those who heard and exaggerated them, were ca- 
pable of being construed in a serious light, and the 
utterance of which may be said to have justified both 
anxiety and distress. Here, as elsewhere, the^ true 
Pater is to be seen in his writings, and not in his ironi- 
cal dicta. And any careful student of his deliberate 
thoughts finds no difficulty in discerning the delicacy 
and the loftiness of his view. He refused, it is true, to 
take a conventional view of the principles of art ; but 
though the essential purity of art can be distorted into 
a wild appetite for beautiful impressions and sensual 
experience, it can yet be safeguarded and kept in a 
high and austere region, in which the lower impulse 
is entirely inconsistent with the grave appreciation of 
beauty. 

In the aesthetic movement, Pater concerned himself 
solely with the doctrine ; but at the same time it is 
undeniably true that the leaders of a movement are 
always judged by the extravagances of their followers ; 



196 WALTER PATER [chap. 

and the anxiety and even suspicion with which. Pater's 
views were at one time regarded in Oxford, were due 
to the fact that those with whom he was in a certain 
sense in sympathy on the higher aesthetic grounds, 
applied the doctrine of beauty to a recklessness of 
practice which Pater not only condemned, but the con- 
templation of which both disgusted and appalled him. 
It is better to have no misconception on this point. 
It is as unfair to think of Pater as in sympathy with 
the decadent school, as it is to attribute to the original 
teachers of Predestination the immoral distortion of the 
doctrines which disgraced some of their fanatical sec- 
taries. When the whole' movement has, so to speak, 
shaken down ; when we can look dispassionately at 
the part which the aesthetic school has played in the 
mental development of the age, we shall be able, while 
we condemn whole-heartedly the excesses of the ad- 
vanced disciples, to discern the part that Pater and the 
other leaders of the movement played in setting the 
deliberate appreciation of beauty, the sedulous training 
of the perceptions in the discrimination of the subtle 
effects of impassioned art, in its right place among the 
forces which tend to the ennobling of human character 
and temperament. 

Having thus drawn out, as far as possible, what 
Pater's ethical creed was not, let us try to indicate 
the nature and movement of his religious life. He 
began, it is plain, by feeling the strong aesthetic at- 
traction of the accessories of religion ; probably he 
did not disentangle the elements of religious faith from 
the effect which great churches, solemn ceremonial, 
ecclesiastical music, and hieratic pomp had upon his 
mind. As Jowett is once, in early days, reported 
to have said to him somewhat irritably, at the close 
of a discussion, " Mr. Pater, you seem to think that 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 197 

religion is all idolatry ! " But as soon as Pater 
plunged into the study of metaphysics, he found that 
philosophy began to act as a solvent upon his creed ; 
he still had a bias towards the expression of religious 
truth; and his half -formed idea of becoming a Uni- 
tarian minister, which, as I have said, was suggested 
in all probability by the career of Coleridge, was the 
outcome of this mood. 

After this impulse, if it was ever so much as an 
impulse, died away, he seems to have been content for 
some years to suspend his judgment. He even, both in 
public and in private, used expressions which indicated 
an attitude of definite hostility to the Christian posi- 
tion. He was immersed in artistic conceptions, and in 
practical work; but as he grew older the old associa- 
tions began to reassert themselves ; he found, like so 
many people of speculative temperament, who set out 
on a philosophical quest with an impatience of re- 
ceived traditions and conventional opinion, that there 
was far more truth in the accumulated treasures of 
human thought, simple and in many ways contradictory 
as they appeared, than he had originally believed. As 
he wrote once, in one of his reviews for the Guardian, 
"the religious, the Catholic, ideal, ... the only mode of 
poetry realisable by the poor." 

He discovered afresh the tranquillising influence of 
a direct faith on quiet people — of the type that he 
described in another review; speaking of sacristans 
as " simple people coming and going there, devout, or 
at least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, 
not without touches of kindly humour, in what seems 
to express like a picture the most genial side, midway 
between the altar and the home, of the ecclesiastical 
life." And thus the old quiet consecration of life by 
faith, not very confident perhaps, hardly more than 



198 WALTER PATER [chap. 

a sacred hope of beautiful and tender possibilities, re- 
asserted itself. 

As Lady Dilke wrote of a talk with, him in the 
later years : — 

" Pater came and sate with me till dinner-time. We had 
been talking before that on the exclusive cultivation of the 
memory in modern teaching as tending to destroy the power 
of thought, by sacrificing the attitude of meditation to that 
of perpetual apprehension. When the others left we went 
on talking of the same matter, but on different lines. Thence 
we came to how it might be possible, under present conditions 
of belief, to bring people up not as beasts but as men by the 
endeavour to train feeling and impart sentiments as well as 
information. He looks for an accession of strength to the 
Roman Church, and thinks that if it would abandon its folly 
in political and social intrigue, and take up the attitude of 
a purely spiritual power, it would be, if not the best thing 
that could happen, at any rate better than the selfish vulgarity 
of the finite aims and ends which stand in the place of an 
ideal in most lives now. He has changed a great deal, as I 
should think for the better, and is a stronger man." 

Pater spoke, indeed, as I conceive, very plainly in 
one place — the review of Robert Elsmere — of what was 
the inner attitude of his mind : — 

" Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which 
cannot be sure that the sacred story is true. It is philo- 
sophical, doubtless, and a duty to the intellect to recognise 
our doubts, to locate them, perhaps to give them practical 
effect. It may be also a moral duty to do this. But then 
there is also a large class of minds which cannot be sure it is 
false — minds of very various degrees of conscientiousness and 
intellectual power, up to the highest. They will think those 
who are quite sure it is false, unphilosophical through lack of 
doubt. For their part, they make allowance in their scheme 
of life for a great possibility, and with some of them that 
bare concession of possibility (the subject of it being what it 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 199 

is) becomes the most important fact in the world. The recog- 
nition of it straightway opens wide the door to hope and 
love; and such persons are, as we fancy they always will be, 
the nucleus of a Church. Their particular phase of doubt, of 
philosophic uncertainty, has been the secret of millions of 
good Christians, multitudes of worthy priests. They knit 
themselves to believers, in various degrees, of all ages." 

And thus he came both to feel and to express a 
deep and sincere sympathy with the Christian point of 
view; Marius reveals most subtly the closeness of this 
approximation ; but it may be seen, in scattered hints 
and touches, through all his later writings. Speak- 
ing, for instance, of the death of Socrates he wrote 
that the "details, as one cannot but observe in 
passing, which leave those famous hours, even for 
purely human, or say ! pagan dignity and tender- 
ness, wholly incomparable to one sacred scene to 
which they have sometimes been compared." A 
friend of Pater's tells me that the present Bishop of 
Birmingham, Dr. Gore, went to the Brasenose Church 
Society to read a paper on the Blessed Trinity, and 
was rather taken aback to find Pater in the chair. 
"However, he proved to be an admirable chairman, 
directing the discussion after the paper, and checking 
anything approaching irreverence." 

He wrote Mrs. Humphry Ward a very interesting 
letter on December 23, 1885, on receiving from her 
as a Christmas gift her newly published translation 
of AmieVs Journal. After congratulating her on 
the admirable literary grace of the translation, he 
continued: — 

"I find a store of general interest in Amiel, (take at random, 
e.g., the shrewd criticism of Quinet,) which must attract all 
those who care for literature ; while for the moralist and the 
student of religion he presents the additional attraction of yet 



200 WALTER PATER [chap. 

another thoroughly original and individual witness to experi- 
ences on the subject they care most for. For myself, I gather 
from your well-meditated introduction, that I shall think, 
on finishing the book, that there was still something Amid 
might have added to those elements of natural religion, (so to 
call it, for want of a better expression,) which he was able to 
accept, at times with full belief, and always with the sort of 
hope which is a great factor in life. To my mind, the beliefs, 
and the function in the world, of the historic church, form 
just one of those obscure but all-important possibilities, which 
the human mind is powerless effectively to dismiss from itself; 
and might wisely accept, in the first place, as a workable 
hypothesis. The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, 
utterly incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, 
seem to me matters of very much the same sort of assent we 
give to any assumption, in the strict and ultimate sense, 
moral. The question whether those facts were real will, I 
think, always continue to be what I should call one of the 
natural questions of the human mind." 

In connection with this frame of mind we may quote 
an interesting passage which occurs in the Greek 
Studies (" The Bacchanals of Euripides"). He is speak- 
ing of Euripides, at the end of a long life of varied 
emotion and experience; he says: — 

" Writing in old age, he is in that subdued mood, a mood 
not necessarily sordid, in which (the shudder at the nearer 
approach of the unknown world coming over him more 
frequently than of old) accustomed ideas, comformable to a 
sort of common sense regarding the unseen, oftentimes regain 
what they may have lost, in a man's allegiance. It is a sort 
of madness, he begins to think, to differ from the received 
opinions thereon. Not that he is insincere or ironical, but 
that he tends, in the sum of probabilities, to dwell on their 
more peaceful side; to sit quiet, for the short remaining time, 
in the reflexion of the more cheerfully lighted side of things; 
and what is accustomed — what holds of familiar usage — 
comes to seem the whole essence of wisdom, on all subjects ; 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 201 

and the well-known delineation of the vague country, in 
Homer or Hesiod, one's best attainable mental outfit, for the 
journey thither." 

This is no doubt a true picture of the writer's own 
inner mood, a forecast of the later years in which the 
excitement of the quest for new ideas, new experiences, 
dies down ; and a man begins to rediscover for himself 
the humanity, the reality, of the old and constant 
stock of mortal tradition ; the thoughts that have tor- 
tured, comforted, attracted, satisfied, the great company 
of mankind. 

When he lived in London he was fond of attending 
St. Paul's Cathedral, St. Albans, Holborn, and other 
high Anglican Churches ; and he was sometimes seen 
at the Carmelites' Church in Kensington; but there 
is no sort of evidence that he had any thought of 
Anglican orders, or that he was tending towards 
Roman Catholicism. He found in religion a deep and 
tranquillising force, and recognised the religious in- 
stinct, the intuitions of faith, as a Divine influence 
even more direct and unquestionable than the artistic 
or the intellectual influence. And thus we may think 
of him as one who, though his intellectual subtlety 
prevented his aiming at any very precise definition of 
his creed, was yet deeply penetrated by the perfect 
beauty and holiness of the Christian ideal, and reposed 
in trembling faith on 'the bosom of his Father and 
his God.' 

Much that is beside the mark has been written and 
said about Pater's precise habits of composition. The 
truth is that they were in no way unusual. The com- 
mon tradition is that he wrote words and sentences 
upon cards, and then when he had accumulated a 
sufficient store, he dealt them out as though he were 
playing a game of patience, and made them into a 



202 WALTER PATER [chap. 

species of mosaic. The real truth, is much simpler. 
When he was studying a subject he took abundance 
of notes, but instead of making them in a note-book, 
he preferred slips of paper, for the greater convenience 
of sorting them, and arranged them in order so that 
they might illustrate the divisions of his subject. 

Mr. Gosse, to whom was entrusted the task of de- 
ciphering the fragmentary manuscript of the " Pascal," 
gives one or two interesting instances of these notes, 
most of which are of the nature of passing thoughts, 
captured for future reference. One runs : — 

" Something about the gloomy Byzantine archit., belfries, 
solemn night come in about the birds attracted by the 
Towers." 

And again : — 

" ? did he suppose predestination to have taken place, only 
after the Fall?" 

When he had arranged his notes he began to write 
on ruled paper, leaving the alternate lines blank ; and 
in these spaces he would insert new clauses and de- 
scriptive epithets. Then the whole was re-copied, 
again on alternate lines, which would again be filled ; 
moreover, he often had an essay at this stage set up at 
his own expense in print, that he might better be able 
to judge of the effect; the same device that Tennyson 
so often used. 

The work of writing grew easier to him as time 
went on. " Ah ! it is much easier now," he said to 
Mr. Gosse, near the end of his life. "If I live long 
enough, no doubt I shall learn quite to like writing." 

He was a regular rather than a hard worker. It was 
his habit for many years to devote two or three hours 
of the morning to writing, and he often wrote again 
for another hour in the afternoon. But he never worked 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 203 

late at night ; writing was to him an absorbing and at 
the same time a fatiguing process, to be pursued tem- 
perately and quietly. Some writers work for a time as 
though possessed, fall into a profound exhaustion when 
a book is finished, and then lie fallow for a time. Such 
was never Pater's way. His writing was his central 
concern; he loved it with an ever-growing love; it 
formed the staple employment of his days ; but his 
friends say that there never was a man who seemed to 
be always so free from preoccupation, so ready to put 
his work aside, and enter into conversation of the most 
trivial kind; there were no furtive glances at the clock, 
none of the air of jealous if patient resignation, no 
hunted sense of the desire to escape from interruption. 

Again, too much emphasis has been laid upon the 
conscious fatigue and exhaustion arising from his work. 
He was not, like Flaubert, the racked and tortured 
medium of his thought. He was a man of low physi- 
cal vitality, and he would sometimes half-humorously 
lament the labour that his work cost him. But the toil 
and the delight were inextricably intermingled ; such 
writing as Pater's with its subtle distinctions, its fine 
metaphors, its delicate effects, its haunted richness, its 
remote images, its liquid cadences, could never have 
been produced except by one who tasted to the full 
the artistic pleasure of elaborate workmanship. And 
it is beyond all doubt that his work became to him in 
increasing measure the mainspring of his life, a spring 
of the purest joy. 

One source of his concentrated strength was that he 
never wasted time in experimental researches ; he knew 
his own mind ; he knew exactly what interested him 
and the limitations of his taste ; thus he confined his 
ideals to a restricted circle, and though perhaps losing 
somewhat in catholicity of thought, he gained astonish- 



204 WALTER PATER [chap. 

ing depth and insight in certain specified directions. 
But he made no parade of omniscience. He used to 
say smilingly that it was such a relief to work hard at 
a subject and then forget all about it. 

One of Pater's happiest accomplishments was his 
power of bringing up in a few words a figure or a 
scene, beautiful in itself and charged moreover with 
a further and remote significance, revealing as by a 
sudden glimpse or hint some solemn thought en- 
shrined within the outer form. Thus he said once 
that churches where the Sacrament was reserved gave 
one the sense of a house where a dead friend lies ; and 
again in a subtle allegory he touched the difference 
between Koman Catholicism with all its rich fabric of 
association and tradition, and Puritanism with its naked 
insistence on bare rectitude and rigid conduct. Eoman 
Catholicism, he said, was like a table draped in fair 
linen, covered with lights and flowers and vessels of 
crystal and silver ; while Puritanism was like the same 
table, after it had been cleared, serviceable enough, 
but without charm or grace. The essential form pres- 
ent in both; but the one furnished with rich and 
dainty accessories, the other unadorned and plain. 

It may be said generally that richness under a severe 
restraint is the principal characteristic of Pater's style ; 
but there are two or three special small characteristics, 
almost amounting to mannerisms, which may be noted 
in his writing. One is the natural result of his habit 
of composition ; it is of overloading his sentences, of 
introducing long parentheses, of heaping fine detail 
together, which sometimes gives an impression of over- 
luxuriousness. Here is a typical sentence, out of one 
of the Guardian Essays, the review of Wordsworth : — 

" An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged not to the 
moving leaves or water only, but to the distant peak arising 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 205 

suddenly, by some change of perspective, above the nearer 
horizon of the hills, to the passing space of light across the 
plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain 
weird fellowship in it with the moods of men." 

This sentence has every charm except the charm of 
perfect lucidity. But any one who enjoys the char- 
acteristic quality of Pater, will be able to give its due 
value to the slight blurring of outline on which the 
charm to a certain extent depends. 

Again, he was fond of beginning a sentence with the 
emphatic phrase, and thus inverting the clause. Where 
another writer would say, "That tale of hours, the 
long chanted English service, develops patience," 
Pater wrote: "It develops patience — that tale of 
hours, the long chanted English service." And again : 
"Horace! — he was, had been always, the idol of 
their school." And again : " Submissiveness ! — It had 
the force of genius with Emerald Uthwart." Such 
sentences, occurring as a rule at the opening of a para- 
graph, are of constant occurrence. He had a fondness 
for points of exclamation : " How wretched ! how fine ! 
how inconceivably great and difficult ! — not for him ! " 
and his frequent introduction of the word "say!" 
with its stop breaking the continuity of the clause 
where an ordinary writer would use "for instance," 
is a favourite usage. 

It is clear that he did not aim primarily at simplicity 
or lucidity. His style was deliberately adopted and 
practised, and he was careful to allow no influence 
whatever to interfere with it. He told Mr. Gosse that 
he had read scarcely a chapter of Stevenson, and not a 
line of Mr. Kipling. 

" I feel, from what I hear about them," he said, " that they 
are strong ; they might lead me out of my path. I want to go 



206 WALTER PATER [chap. 

on writing in my own way, good or bad. I should be afraid 
to read Kipling, lest he should come between me and my 
page next time I sat down to write." 

His view was that slipshod impressionism, rough, 
sketchy emphasis, was the literary fault of the time 
which needed to be sternly resisted. Writing of a 
serious kind, he felt, ought to be a strenuous, almost a 
learned process. He wrote in one of the reviews he 
contributed to the Guardian: — 

" Well, the good quality of an age, the defect of which lies in 
the direction of intellectual anarchy and confusion, may well 
be eclecticism. ... A busy age will hardly educate its 
writers in correctness. Let its writers make time to write 
English more as a learned language." 

This thought had its effect upon his writing, even 
when he was dealing with the apprehension of the 
ordinary objects of sense and perception. 

Great as was Pater's appreciation of nature, and fine 
as was his perception of the quality and beauty of 
landscape, it is almost always through a medium of 
art that he beheld it. Nature is to him always a set- 
ting, a background, subordinated to the human interest. 
The thought that men had laboured, painfully or 
joyfully, over a building, or a picture, or a book, in- 
vested the result with a certain sacredness in his 
eyes. The nearer that outward things approached 
to humanity, the more they appealed to Pater. The 
home, the house, the room, its furniture and decora- 
tion, the garden, the pleasaunce, all these were nearer 
to his heart than nature in her wilder and sterner as- 
pects, because the thought and hand of humanity had 
passed over them, writing its care and its dreams 
legibly on cornice and lintel, on panel and beam, on 
chest and press, on alley and bower, on border and 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 207 

fountain. When, as in " Duke Carl of Kosenmold," or 
in " Sebastian van Storck," he describes the sunny 
vine-clad country, or the lonely clump on the long hill 
that seems to summon the vagrant foot thither, or the 
frozen lake with the fur-clad skaters moving to and 
fro, it is always with a sense of how such scenes might 
have been painted. It was always nature seen through 
the eye of the artist rather than in the mind of the 
poet. There is little sense of expanse or largeness 
about these natural touches ; they are rather caught at 
salient points, in glimpses and vignettes, grouped and 
isolated. It may be observed how rarely he alludes 
to natural sounds j these visions seem to be seen in a 
reflective silence, recorded and represented by the 
mind that has stored itself full of minute pictorial 
impressions. Pater went to nature, not in the spirit 
of Wordsworth, to exult in the freedom, the width, 
the tenderness, the energy, the vastness of it all ; but 
rather as a great quarry of impressions, through which 
he walked with a perceptive gaze, selecting and de- 
taching striking and charming effects, which could 
afterwards be renewed and meditated over in the 
home-keeping mind. None of his direct nature-touches, 
beautiful as they are, are penetrated with quite the 
same zest and emotion as his descriptions of nature 
when represented by some master-hand. It was the 
penetration of nature by human personality that gave 
it its value for Pater, its significance; and thus it 
comes about that his descriptions of scenes always 
seem, so to speak, to have a frame about them. He 
did not, like a poet, desire to escape from man to 
nature ; but rather to suffuse nature at every point 
with humanity, to judge of it, to feel its beauty, not 
as the direct expression of the mind of God, but as it 
affected and appealed to man. 



208 WALTER PATER [chap. 

It might have been imagined that so deliberate and 
precise a craftsman, with so definite a theory of his 
art, would perhaps have held on his way producing 
his careful masterpieces, content to put it on record 
that he had thought thus, and expressed it just so, 
content that the beautiful thing should be formed and 
fashioned, and made available for the use or delight 
of any that followed the same or a like path among 
the things of the soul. One could have supposed Pater 
indifferent to criticism and censure, deeming it enough 
not to be unfaithful to the heavenly vision. For to 
him, doubtless, the first and chiefest pleasure lay in 
the thrilling thought, that thought which sets the 
writer's spirit all aglow, leaping into the mind, as it 
does, with an almost physical shock, and opening up 
a sudden vista of possibilities ; as when a man, walking 
in a wood, comes suddenly across a ride, and sees the 
green space run to left and right, with its carpet of 
flowers, its leafy walls. And next to that first and 
sacred joy came the delight of the slow and careful 
conception, tracing the development, restricting the 
ramification, foreseeing the proportion. Then followed 
the later joy, the gradual embroidery of the austere 
outline, the laying of thread by thread, of colour by 
colour ; and then the final pleasure of strict revision, 
of enriching the close texture, of strengthening the 
languid cadence, of refining the refined epithet, the 
eagerness to reach that impossible perfection that 
seemed to recede even as he drew near. 

Yet even to a craftsman thus wholeheartedly intent 
upon his work, there is a satisfaction in publication 
which is like the framing of a picture. The book with 
its white margins, its delicate sprinkling of ornament, 
its headings and mottoes, all this is the symbol of com- 
pletion, of an end attained. There is a further delight 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 209 

still in the possibility of becoming thus the companion 
of the imagined reader; to be held in unknown hands 
and scanned by gentle eyes ; to appeal to kindred na- 
tures, kindly and generous persons ; the thought of 
this to one like Pater, who had found so many in the 
world whom he could love, and to whom human rela- 
tions had always so deep and sacred a significance, 
was full of a potent attraction. But one is perhaps 
surprised to learn that he was also deeply sensitive to 
adverse criticism ; that he felt about the harsh and 
summary treatment of his books, especially when they 
were misrepresented or misunderstood, something of 
what the old Psalmist felt, when he prayed that his 
darling might be delivered from the power of the dog. 
There were times when he suffered acutely from the 
attacks of critics, as when the exquisite and elaborate 
Essay on " Style " was treated as incomprehensible and 
affected ; when he declared with desolate conviction 
that his pleasure in writing was gone, and that he could 
never resume his work. Only those nearest to him 
knew of these dark moods of discouragement, because 
he was not one who took the world into his confidence ; 
indeed, to those who were without, his gentle and 
equable manner seemed to bear witness to a tran- 
quillity of mind, which indeed he sedulously practised, 
although he never attained the deep serenity of which 
he was in search. 

It is a curious fact that Pater showed no precocious 
signs, in boyhood and youth, of a desire to write. 
Those in whose blood stirs the creative impulse, the 
literary energy, feel the thrill as a rule very early, 
and cover paper diligently from their first years. But 
Pater's family cannot remember that he ever showed 
any particular tendency to write. He never wrote 
poetry in childhood, except a few humorous verses, 



210 WALTER PATER [chap. 

long lost and forgotten ; later on he made some verse- 
translations from Goethe, Alfred de Musset, and the 
Greek Anthology ; and this abstention from the com- 
position of verse is a remarkable fact in the case of one 
whose prose is so essentially poetical. It is common 
to differentiate the prose of poets, as in the case of 
Dryden, Keats, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and others, 
from the prose of those who have never attempted to 
write in verse; it is thought that it has a greater 
precision, a sonorous richness, a more vivid colouring. 
If Pater had ever practised the art of poetry, it would 
be easy to point to his prose as a supreme instance of 
these qualities, because, quite apart from its luxurious 
prodigality, both of epithet and image, it has a strong, 
rhythmical, almost metrical movement in places. But, 
as a matter of fact, his chief characteristics, as a prose- 
writer, came to him late. As a rule, the makers of gor- 
geous and exquisite prose have begun by erring on the 
side of diffuseness and ornament, and have chastened 
their style into due proportion and lucidity. But Pater's 
earliest writings, which seem to have been essays for 
Societies, have none of the later charm ; they tend to be 
austere, hard, and even dry. Neither did he arrive at 
his plentiful and magnificent vocabulary, as some writers 
have done, by the production of large masses of writing 
that never see the light, in which their hand has learned 
firmness of outline, and their teeming brain the power 
of summoning the supremely appropriate word from a 
suspended cloud of more or less suitable language. 
His method was far otherwise. At one time he applied 
himself daily for some months to translating a page 
of Sainte-Beuve or Flaubert, and this seems to have 
been his only exercise. His prose steadily grew in 
volume and depth; and the one serious fault of his 
writing, the tendency that his sentences have to 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 211 

become long and involved, did not diminish. What 
he did gain as years went on was a refined and 
surprising power over words, a power of condensing an 
elaborate effect into a single haunting sentence which 
suggests rather than reveals. His work was always 
the result of much patient and unseen labour; but 
though he revised carefully and jealously enough in 
many cases, his richness was not derived in reality so 
much from these stippled effects, as from the fulness 
of mind out of which he wrote. Any one who has ever 
gone over the same ground as Pater, and studied the 
same authorities, will be amazed to find how con- 
scientiously and diligently the material has all been 
employed ; not by elaborately amplifying detail, but 
by condensing an abundance of scattered points into a 
single illuminating hint, a poignant image, an apt 
illustration. He was entirely remote from those easy 
superficial writers who generalise from insufficient pre- 
mises, and bridge the gaps in their knowledge by grace- 
ful fabrics of words. All Pater's work was strongly 
focussed; he drew the wandering and scattered 
rays, as through a crystal lens, into a burning and 
convergent point of light. Not to travel far for in- 
stances, the essay on Leonardo is a perfect example 
of this. The writing is so delicate, so apparently 
fanciful, that it is only through a careful study of the 
available tradition that one comes to realise how 
minute is the knowledge that furnishes out these 
gemmed and luminous sentences. It is true that his 
knowledge is not pedantically applied, that he concerns 
himself little with minute and technical questions of 
art-criticism ; but I conceive that Pater's attempt was 
always to discern the inner beauty, the essence of the 
thing; to disentangle the personality, the humanity 
of the artist, rather than to classify or analyse the 



212 WALTER PATER [chap. 

work. And so it comes about that his art-criticism 
is essentially a creative thing, that adds little to the 
historical aspect of the development of art, and falls 
indeed at times into positive error ; the training, the 
severe observation, the cultivated instinct, is there, 
but it is relegated, so to speak, to an ante-room, while 
the spirit is led to apprehend something of the mysteri- 
ous issues of art, initiated into the secret appreciation 
of beauty, and drawn to worship in the darkened 
innermost shrine. There is always something holy, 
even priestly, about Pater's attitude to art. It insists 
upon the initial critical training, the necessity of 
ordered knowledge ; but it leaves this far behind ; it 
passes beyond the nice apprehension of eye, the culti- 
vated sense of line and colour, the exact discrimination 
of style and medium, into a remote and poetical region. 
Such secrets cannot be explained or even analysed ; 
they cannot be communicated to those that are with- 
out ; they must be emotionally and mystically appre- 
hended, by the soul rather than by the mind. 

It was this secret vision, this inner enlightening, on 
which Pater had set his heart, and which he sought for 
urgently and diligently. He loved the symbol, not for 
itself alone, but for the majesty which it contained, the 
hidden light which it guarded. It is in this region 
alone that he seems to wear an absorbed and pontifical 
air, not with the false sacerdotal desire to enhance 
personal impressiveness and private dignity, through 
the ministry of divine powers and holy secrets, but 
with the unconscious emotion of one whose eyes 
behold great wonders enacting themselves upon the 
bodiless air, which the dull and the contemptuous may 
not discern. 

It remains to attempt to indicate Pater's position in 
later English literature, and his philosophy, or rather his 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 213 

point of view, by summarising what has already, it is to 
be hoped, been made clear by analysis. 

In literature he practically struck out a new line. 
The tendency of the best prose-writers of the century 
had been, as a rule, to employ prose in a prosaic manner. 
Landor had aimed at a Greek austerity of style. 
Macaulay had brought to perfection a bright hard- 
balanced method of statement, like the blowing of sharp 
trumpets. This was indeed the prose that had recom- 
mended itself to the taste of the early Victorians ; it 
was full of a certain sound and splendour ; it rolled 
along in a kind of impassioned magnificence ; but the 
object of it was to emphasise superficial points in an 
oratorical manner, to produce a glittering panorama 
rich in detail; it made no appeal to the heart or the 
spirit, awaking at best a kind of patriotic optimism, a 
serene self-glorification. 

Carlyle had written from the precisely opposite point 
of view ; he was overburdened with passionate meta- 
physics which he involved in a texture of rugged 
Euphuism, intensely mannerised. But he had no 
catholicity of grasp, and his picturesqueness had little 
subtlety or delicacy, because his intense admiration for 
certain qualities and types blinded him to finer shades 
of character. There was no restraint about his style, 
and thus his enthusiasm turned to rant, his statement 
of preferences degenerated into a species of frantic 
bombast. 

With these Pater had nothing in common ; the 
writers with whom he is more nearly connected are 
Charles Lamb, De Quincey, Newman, and Kuskin. He 
was akin to Charles Lamb in the delicacy of touch, the 
subtle flavour of language ; and still more in virtue of 
his tender observation, his love of interior domestic 
life. He has a certain nearness to De Quincey in the 



214 WALTER PATER [chap. 

impassioned autobiographical tendency, the fondness 
for retrospect, which Pater considered the character- 
istic of the poetical temperament. He is akin to New- 
man in respect of the restraint, the economy of effect, 
the perfect suavity of his work; but none of these 
probably exerted any very direct influence upon him. 
Euskin perhaps alone of the later prose-writers had a 
permanent effect on the style of Pater. He learnt from 
Euskin to realise intensely the suggestiveness of art, 
to pursue the subjective effect upon the mind of the 
recipient; but though the rich and glowing style of 
Euskin enlarged the vocabulary of Pater, yet we can 
trace the time when he parted company with him, and 
turned aside in the direction of repression rather than 
volubility, of severity rather than prodigality. 

It may be said, then, that Pater really struck out a 
new line in English prose, working on the principles 
enunciated by Flaubert in a widely different region. 
The essence of his attempt was to produce prose that 
had never before been contemplated in English, full 
of colour and melody, serious, exquisite, ornate. He 
devoted equal pains both to construction and orna- 
mentation. Whether he is simple and stately, whether 
he is involved and intricate, he has the contrast always 
in view. His object was that every sentence should 
be weighted, charged with music, haunted with echoes ; 
that it should charm and suggest, rather than convince 
or state. The danger of the perfection to which he 
attained is the danger of over-influence, seductive 
sweetness ; the value is to suggest the unexplored 
possibilities of English as a vehicle for a kind of prose 
that is wholly and essentially poetical. The triumph 
of his art is to be metrical without metre, rhythmical 
without monotony. There will, of course, always be 
those whom this honeyed, laboured cadence will affect 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 215 

painfully with a sense of something stifling and over- 
perfumed; and, indeed, the merits of a work of art 
can never be established by explanation or defended 
by argument; but to such as can apprehend, feel, 
enjoy, there is the pleasure of perfected art, of lan- 
guage that obeys and enriches the thought, of calcu- 
lated effect, of realisation, with a supreme felicity of 
the intention of the writer. 

One does not praise his works as the perfection of 
style; there is a limpidity and lucidity of prose style — 
prose as used by Newman, by Matthew Arnold, by 
Ruskin, in chastened moods, — to which no style that 
depends upon elaborateness and artifice can attain; 
but it may fairly be claimed for Pater that he realised 
his own conception of perfection. The style is heavy 
with ornament, supple with artifice. It is not so much 
a picture as an illumination. For sunlight there is 
stiff burnished gold; it is full of gorgeous conceits, 
jewelled phrases ; it has no ease or simplicity ; it is all 
calculated, wrought up, stippled; but it must be con- 
sidered from that point of view ; it must be appraised 
rather than criticised, accepted rather than judged. 

To feel the charm it is necessary to be, to some 
extent, in sympathy with the philosophy of Pater. 
We see in him a naturally sceptical spirit, desiring to 
plunge beneath established systems and complacent 
explanations; and this, in common with an intense 
sensibility to every hint and intimation of beauty, 
apprehended in a serious and sober spirit; not the 
spirit that desires to possess itself of the external 
elements, but to penetrate the essential charm. Yet 
it is not the patient and untroubled beauty of nature, 
of simple effects of sun and shade, of great mountains, 
of wide plains, but of a remote and symbolical beauty, 
seen by glimpses and in corners, of which he was 



216 WALTER PATER [chap. 

in search — beauty with which is mixed a certain 
strangeness and mystery, that suggests an inner and 
a deeper principle behind, intermingled with a sadness, 
a melancholy, that is itself akin to beauty. 

There is always an interfusion of casuistical and 
metaphysical thought with Pater's apprehension of 
beauty; he seems to be ever desirous to draw near 
to the frankness, the unashamed happiness, of the 
Greek spirit, but to be for ever held back by a 
certain fence of scepticism, a malady of thought. 

Yet the beauty of which he takes account is essen- 
tially of a religious kind; it draws the mind to the 
further issue, the inner spirit. All the charm of ritual 
and ceremonial in worship has for Pater an indefinable 
and constant attraction. He is for ever recurring to it, 
because it seems to him to interpret and express an 
emotion, a need of the human spirit, whose concern is 
to comprehend if it can what is the shadowy figure, 
the mysterious will, that moves behind the world of 
sight and sense. 

We can trace the progress of thought in the case of 
Pater as clearly as it is possible to trace the thought of 
any recent writer; though reticent and even suavely 
ironical in talk, he was in his writings at once self- 
centred and intime. His own emotions, his own pre- 
occupations, were absorbingly important to him ; yet 
while he shrank from giving them facile utterance, he 
was irresistibly impelled to take the world into his 
confidence. He had none of the frank egotism of 
Wordsworth, none of the complacent belief in the 
interest of his revelations of himself ; and yet there 
is no writer that speaks more persistently and self- 
consciously of his own point of view. He made little 
attempt to pass outside of it, and hardly disguised 
what he would fain have concealed. The instinct, 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 217 

indeed, for expression triumphs at every point over 
the instinct for reticence. 

We see the silent, self-contained boyhood, the in- 
tellectual awakening, the absorption in metaphysics, 
and their abandonment, the eager pursuit of recondite 
beauty, that from the days of his maturity never left 
him ; we see in the candour, the urbanity, the delicate 
and gentle outlook, the intellectual strenuousness, of 
his heroes a reflection of his own personal ideal. We 
see how he was led to trust personal intuitions rather 
than intellectual processes; to listen rather for the 
simpler, sweeter message which comes from life, from 
experience, from sympathy, than to obey the logical 
conclusions of reason, which indeed arrives so soon at 
the consciousness of its own limitations; we see that 
he determined that the function of reason was rather 
to keep judgment suspended; that it should be applied 
as a solvent alike to philosophical and religious 
systems; but that the spirit should not thus be 
bound ; that reason should indeed erect the framework 
of the house, its walls and doorways — and that then its 
work was done ; while the spirit should dwell within, 
drawing its strength from the tender observation of 
humanity, from humble service, from quiet companion- 
ship, while it should all the time keep its eyes open to 
any faintest message flashed from afar, whether it 
came through glance or word, through book or 
picture, through charm of form or colour, from tower 
or tree, from the clear freshness of the solitary dawn, 
or from the orange sunset dying softly over wide, 
glimmering fields. 

" Behold, this dreamer cometh ! " So, with an en- 
vious contempt, the petty-minded scheming brethren 
of the inspired child beloved of God greeted him, as he 



218 WALTER PATER [chap. 

came in unsuspecting innocence to join them in the 
field. He was to learn, even in the tender days of 
boyhood, how heavy a burden that secret knowledge 
was to be, that inheritance of the inner and deeper 
sight which could pierce behind the veil of mortality. 
If he could have foreseen the weary way he was to 
travel to the calm and prosperous eminence of later 
years, would he not have hidden the visions which he 
revealed so guilelessly? Not even the certainty of 
the honour and comfort of the future would have 
made amends for the loneliness, the malignity, of the 
labyrinth which he was so gently and faithfully to 
thread. This power of inner sight, this perception of 
the essence of things, must always, it seems, bring its 
possessor a certain sadness, a certain isolation. The 
prosperous worldly spirits, that swim so vigorously on 
the surface of things, have always a suspicion, a jealousy, 
a contempt, for one who dives deeper and brings back 
tidings of the strange secrets that the depth holds. 
But if such clear-sighted spirits go tranquilly upon their 
way, and utter fearlessly the truth they discern, though 
the way be difficult and arduous, the honour comes at 
last, unsought, unprized. And it is well perhaps that 
the conquest is so hard, because if the victory came at 
once, with it would doubtless come the relish for the 
easy, the obvious triumph; but by the time that it 
arrives, the pure spirit, chastened and refined, has 
reached a region where the only pleasure that fame 
brings is the knowledge that the truth has somewhat 
prevailed. There is no taint of personal complacency, 
no luxurious yielding to lower satisfactions, nothing 
but the unstained delight that the mystery, discerned 
and interpreted, is bearing in other hearts its rich and 
reviving fruits. 

Such is the life that I have attempted to depict. It 



vii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 219 

is the life of one who, through a dreamful and un- 
praised boyhood, through a silent and undistinguished 
youth, gradually discerned a principle in things ; 
learned to see, with an impassioned zest, the truth 
that, in art and life alike, the victory is with those who 
attain to a certain patient and appreciative attitude 
of soul ; who learn through careful toil, through much 
sorting of accumulated thought and expression, to dis- 
criminate between what is facile, impressive, specious, 
and what is deep, permanent, sincere. No taste can 
of course be wholly catholic ; it is swayed by instinct, 
prepossession, and preference. But the point is, in 
however limited a sphere, to be able to detect with 
unfailing certainty the true quality of things. 

He of whom we speak achieved this art of subtle 
discrimination, a gift which is shared by dumb and 
learned connoisseurs ; but above this rise a few, who 
can not only by a trained instinct recognise what 
is perfect, but who can express their methods and 
powers so that canons and standards can be formed. 
Then to but one or two in a generation is given a 
further gift: the creative, the poetical power to 
express in language of high and haunting beauty the 
deepest mysteries of art ; who can not only praise in 
noble and inspiring terms the beautiful thing, the 
exquisite work, the flashing thought, but can disen- 
tangle the very essence of the secret, establish remote 
and subtle connections, and open, if only for one 
glorious instant, a door into the inner shrine, showing a 
vision of awful angels, bent on high service, interpret- 
ing the loud crying of mysterious voices, echoing the 
rising strain that fills the golden-roofed palace, and 
giving perhaps an awe-struck glimpse of the presence 
that sits enthroned there. 

But not always on these august heights does the 



220 WALTER PATER [chap. vii. 

haunted spirit dwell. There is a spell unknown to 
those who live the eager life of affairs, who dwell in 
crowded cities, or who carry the busy, scheming mind 
abroad with them into lonelier places; the spell that 
broods over the wooded valley with its hazel-hidden 
stream, where the bird sings among the thickets ; the 
spell that lies behind the dark tree-trunks of the 
grove that bar the smouldering sunset with shafts 
of shade; that trembles in the green twilight when 
the stars begin to glimmer, and the winds are hushed. 
This too, and its appeal to the heart of man, the tinge 
that it lends to his dreams, the passionate desire to 
record, to represent, to give permanence of form, to 
the hurrying moment — all this needs to be interpreted 
as well. 

But here, to the true prophet of these mysteries, the 
thought that must be caught and touched and given 
shape, is not so much the mystery itself — for that 
is dark and not to be apprehended — but the thrill 
which such visions have communicated to the hearts of 
other pilgrims, who have fared eagerly and sadly 
through the world before us, and have passed into the 
darkness, just leaving, in written signs and pictured 
symbols, the traces of the passion, the desire, the yearn- 
ing, that such things have brought them. Such a task 
as this — this piecing together of personality, this test- 
ing of recorded impressions, this imbuing of ancient, 
half-faded dreams with the sanguine vitality, the eager 
hope, of to-day, needs one who is not less a poet than a 
critic. The dreamer that comes thus must not be 
absorbed in his own fruitful visions, but must be able, 
by an energy of sympathy, a lucid purity of soul, to 
enter no less eagerly into the dim and far-reaching 
visions of other inspired spirits. 



INDEX 



Ainslie, Mr. Douglas, 21, 136, 185. 
America, one of Olney Paters 

emigrate to, 1. 
Amiel's Journal (trans. Mrs. H. 

Ward), 199-200. 
Appleton, Dr. (editor of Acad- 
emy), 21. 
Appreciations, 12; 1st ed. (1889), 

2nd ed. (1890), 33; 119, 122, 

147 — 

11 Aesthetic Poetry " (1868) , 32, 
33; reappeared (1889 ed.), 
omitted (1890 ed.), 153. 

"Charles Lamb," 62-4, 78. 

Coleridge, S. T., considered as 
a philosopher, 12-13. 

"Feuillet's La Morte," 122. 

"Love's Labour's Lost" 
(1898), 78, 153. 

"Measure for Measure " (1874) , 
153, 154. 

"Romanticism" (1876), 64-6, 
reappeared as postscript to 
(1889), 153. 

"Shakespeare's English 

Kings " (1889), 153, superfi- 
cial analysis of, 155-6. 

" Sir Thomas Browne " (1886), 
119-22. 

"Style" (1888), 147-53, 209. 
Apuleius, Golden Book of, 92. 



Arnold, Miss Mary (Mrs. Hum- 
phry Ward), 21. 

Art, History of Ancient (Winck- 
elmann), 29. 

Athenseum, 118. 

Azay-le-Rideau, 32. 



Brasenose College, description 
of, 15-17. 

ancient ceremonies pre- 
served at, 85. 

"Bruno, Giordano" (Gaston de 
Latour), 140,153. 

Bussell, Dr. F. W., devoted com- 
panion to Pater, 21 ; memorial 
sermon on, 24; 180-1, 183, 189. 

Bywater, Prof. Ingram, 20, 192. 



Caird, Dr. Edward, 20. 

Canterbury, King's School at, 2, 

6, 134. 
Capes, Mr. W. W., 20. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 213. 
Champneys, Mr. Basil, 21, 192. 
Child in the House, The. See 

Miscellaneous Studies. 
"Concert, The" (picture), 50. 
Cowper, William, 1. 
Creighton, Bishop, 21. 



221 



222 



WALTER PATER 



Daniel, Dr., 21. 

Mrs., 21. 

Daute (Prefatory Essay to Dr. C. 
L. Shad well's translation of), 
159. 

Defense et Illustration de la 
Langue Francoyse, La (Du 
Bellay), 45. 

Dialogues (Jowett), 56. 

Dictionary of National Biog- 
raphy, 19. 

Dilke, Lady, 37, 198. 



E 



Earthly Paradise, The (Morris), 
35. 

Education (English system com- 
pared with Spartan theory of) , 
167-8. 

Eliot, George, 192. 

English Poets (Ward's), 12. 



Fortnightly Review, publication 
of essays in, 32-3; 67, 119, 140, 
147, 153. 

" France, Some Great Churches 
in," 168-9. 



G 



Goethe, 11, 14, 29, 131. 

Gore, Dr., 199. 

Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 21 ; letter to, 

32 ; 54, 189, 190, 202, 205. 
Greek Studies (1895) — 

" Aegina, The Marbles of," 76. 

"Athletic Prizemen, The Age 
of," 77, 168. 



" Demeter and Persephone, The 

Myth of," 71-2. 
"Dionysus" (1876), 67-70. 
"Euripides, The Bacchanals 

of," 70-1, 200. 
" Greek Sculpture, Beginnings 

of," 74-6. 
"Hippolytus Veiled" (1889), 

73-4, 122, 153. 
Guardian, 48, 57, 118, 119, 204, 

206. 
Guenevere, Defence of (W. 
Morris), 33. 



H 



Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, 176. 
Hursley, 4. 



Imaginary Portraits, 73 — 
" Court Painters, A Prince of " 

(1885), 122. 
Composition of, 124-5, 126. 
"Denys l'Auxerrois " (1886), 

122, 123, 126-8, 131. 
"Duke Carl of Rosenmold " 

(1887), 122, 130-1,207. 
" Sebastianvan Storck " (1886), 

122, 128-30, 131, 207. 
Italy, 9-10, 32. 



Jason (William Morris), 35. 

Johnson, Mr. Lionel, 21. 

Jowett, Rev. Benjamin, 9; his 
opinion of Pater's ability, 54-5, 
56, 57, 196-7 ; Life of, 54, 56. 



Keble, John, 4. 

King's Tragedy, The (Rossetti), 

87. 
Kipling, Rudyard, 205-6. 



INDEX 



223 



Lamb, Charles, 213. 
Latour, Gaston de, 92, 140-7. 
Letters (Pascal), 173. 
Lettres a une Inconnue (Prosper 
Merimee), 158. 



M 

Macmillan's Magazine, 140, 153. 
Mallock, Mr., 52. 
Marhis the Epicurean, 46, 82-3, 
85-9 ; autobiographical impres- 
sion of, 91-115 ; reception of, 
118, 162, 199; quoted, 93-9, 
101-2, 104, 107, 108, 112, 114. 
May, Mrs. Walter, 2. 
Miscellaneous Studies, 10 — 
"Apollo in Picardy" (1893), 

123, 132-4. 
"Art Notes in North Italy," 

159. 
Child in the House, The (1898), 
4, 5, 79-82, 89, 122. 
DiaphaneiU (1864), 10-11. 
Emerald Uthwart (1892), 4, 6, 
123, 131, 134-9, 159. 
"Notre-Dame d'Amiens," 

168-9. 
"Pascal," 169, 202. 
"Prosper Merimee" (1890), 

156-9. 
"Raphael," 159-62. 
"Vezelay" (1894), 169. 



N 

New Republic (Mallock), 52-4; 

55; 193. 
Neio Review, 159. 
Nineteenth Century, 168. 



Olney, 1. 

Oxford, 8, 17-19, 23, 138. 



Paget, Miss (Vernon Lee), 89-90. 

Pall Mall Gazette, 118. 

Pater, Dr. Richard Glode (father), 
1 ; death of, 2. 

Miss (sister), 180. 

Mrs. (mother) , 2 ; death of, 9. 

Walter Horatio, forefathers, 

1-2 ; father, 1 ; birth, 2 ; mother, 
2, 9; brothers and sisters, 2; 
family removes to Enfield, 2; 
visits to Fish Hall, 2 ; goes to 
school at Canterbury, 2; re- 
ligion, 2, 4, 13; religious 
doubts, 173-4, life, 196-201; 
love of symbolism, 3, 86, 85, 
196; reticence, 3, 185; instinct 
for expression triumphs over 
instinct for reticence, 217 ; de- 
sires to take Holy Orders, 3; 
intellectual awakening, 3 ; 
meets Keble, 4; sensitive ap- 
prehension of beauty, 4, 6, 12, 
14, 215-6; seriousness, 164; 
Ruskin's influence, 7; enters 
Queen's College, Oxford, 8; 
course of study, 8-9; takes 
second-class in Final Classical 
Schools, 9; vacations spent in 
Germany, 9; tours in Italy, 9, 
32; elected to Fellowship at 
Brasenose, 9; goes into resi- 
dence, 9; friends, 9-10, 20-1, 
123, their appreciation of, 
180-1 ; his loyalty to, 186, 192 ; 
early work destroyed, 10; 
member of ' Old Mortality ' 
Society, 10; ideal of intel- 
lectual and moral sincerity, 
10-11; interest in philosophy, 
11, 14; influence of Goethe, 
11, 14; first published writing, 
12; beginning of work, 13; 
description of college rooms, 
17-9; simplicity of tastes, 18, 
19, 117, 179; habits, 19-20; as 
a friend, 19-22, 26; dislike of 



224 



WALTER PATER 



responsibility, 23; deep sense 
of, 187; as lecturer, 20, 84; as 
TutdT and Dean, 20, 23, 25, 59, 
84; takes house in Norham 
Gardens, 21; attitude towards 
young men, 24-6; compared 
to Teleinachus, 26; self-reve- 
lation in writings, 27, 170; 
essays published in Fort- 
nightly Beview, 32; first book 
produced, 32; criticism of 
Morris's "Defence of Guene- 
vere," 33-5; consistency and 
individuality, 36 ; revolt 
against synthetic school of 
art-criticism, 37 ; perception of 
music, 44; definition of suc- 
cess, 47; art-criticism, 48-9; a 
great critic, 158 ; writes for 
Guardian, 48; criticism of da 
Vinci, 49; of Botticelli, 50; 
style parodied, 52-4 ; misunder- 
standing with Jowett, 54-5 ; his 
view of Jowett, 55-8; reputa- 
tion as a talker, 59, 188, 193; 
lectures on Greek Studies, 67, 
publication of, 67-78 ; work 
becomes creative rather than 
critical, 78; appearance of 
"The Child in the House," 
79; absorbed in Marius, 82; 
resigns tutorship, 83; physi- 
cal appearance, 85, 178, 180; 
method of criticism, 87-8, of 
working, 89, 123-4; Marius 
published, 89, letters to Miss 
Paget concerning, 89 ; removes 
to London, 117; resides at 
Brasenose during term, 117; 
appreciation of France, 117- 
18 ; most fruitful years, 118; 
contributes to current jour- 
nals, 118-19; essay on Sir T. 
Browne, 119-22; at work on 
Imaginary Portraits, 122, in- 
tends to bring out new volume 
of, 123 ; fantastic writing, 
126-8, lack of restraint in 



style of " Denys l'Auxerrois," 
128 ; melancholy introspective- 
ness, 138-9; engaged on Gaston 
de Latour, 140; composition 
of essay on " Style," 147 ; sum- 
mary of artistic creed, 151; 
ethical base of temperament, 
153, view of end of art, 153, of 
value of the play, 154; skill in 
dealing with Shakespeare's 
works, 154-5; at work on 
Plato and Platonism, 156, 
places this work at the head 
of his own writings, 162, aim 
in, 163; lectures on Merimee, 
159 ; writes introduction to 
Dante, 159; not a philosopher, 
163-5, epigram on, 164; devel- 
opment contrasted with Henry 
Sidgwick's, 165 ; last utterance, 
169 ; deep significance of essay 
on " Pascal," 169-72, admira- 
tion for, 173; summary of 
Pensees, 173; settles at St. 
Giles', Oxford, 174 ; later days, 
174-5 ; receives Hon. Degree of 
LL.D., Glasgow, 175 ; visits 
Northern cathedrals, 175 ; first 
serious illness, 175; recovery, 
subsequent relapse, death, 176 ; 
buried at Holywell Cemetery, 
Oxford, 176; portraits of, 178; 
physical strength varies with 
inner mood, 179; sensibility, 
179; dress, 179-80; shyness, 
180 ; dislike to opposition, 181 ; 
lack of appreciation at Oxford, 
181-2, personal characteristics 
at, 183-4 ; attitude towards the 
world, 185 ; uniform kindness, 
186; aloofness from current 
thought, 186; political views, 
187; reason for residence at 
Oxford, 187; sacrifice to art, 
188; quality of humour, 188- 
91; attracted by cats, 190-1; 
as an examiner, 191-2; anec- 
dotes about, 193-4; irony, 195; 



INDEX 



225 



views on principles of art, 
195-6 ; admiration for Amiel's 
Journal, 199; habits of com- 
position, 201-6 ; significant 
writing, 201 ; principal charac- 
teristics of style, 204, 215; 
typical sentence, 204-5 ; did not 
read Stevenson or Kipling, 
205-6; always regards nature 
as a background, 206-7 ; sensi- 
tiveness to adverse criticism, 
209 ; no precocious desire to 
write, 209-10; abstains from 
verse composition, 210 ; late 
development of style, 210-1; 
attitude towards art, 212 ; 
position in later English lit- 
erature, 212-15; writing con- 
trasted with Carlyle's, 213 ; as 
a writer akin to Charles Lamb, 
213; a dreamer, 217-20. 

Pater's friends, 20, 21. 

Pater, William Thompson 
(brother), 2. 

Pattison, Mark (Rector of Lin- 
coln), 21, 37, 190, 192. 

Pensees (Pascal), 173. 

''Philosophers, The Three" 
("The Chaldean Sages"), 
(picture) , 50. 

Plato, 165, 167. 

Plato and Platonism, 20, 54, 58, 
Jowett's admiration of, 58; be- 
gan to appear (1892) , 156 ; 159 ; 
eventually published (1893), 
162; 163-8. 

Poe, E. A., criticism of, 23. 

Purgatory (C. L. Shadwell's 
trans, of), 159. 



Queen's College (Oxford), des- 
cription of, 8. 

R 

Renaissance, Studies in the His- 
tory of the (with "Preface" 
and "Conclusion"), 1st ed. 
Q 



(1873), 2nd and 3rd (1877), 

32-3; 35,36 — 

"Conclusion," 45, reason for 
exclusion from 2nd ed. of 
Studies, etc., 46, 47-8; prin- 
ciple of selection explained, 
37; Lady Dilke's criticism 
of, 37-8; 49-51,52,59, 162. 

" Aucassin and Nicolette" 
(" Two Early French 
Stories") (1873), 32-3, 38. 

" Joachim du Bellay," 33, 44-5. 

" Leonardo da Vi?ici, Notes 
on" (1869), 32, 41,42-3,49, 
177. 

" Luca della Robbia," 33, 39. 

" Michelangelo, Poetry of," 32, 
39-40. 

'/ Pico della Mirandola" (1871), 
32, 38-9. 

"Sandro Botticelli, A Frag- 
ment on," 32, 39. 

"School of Giorgione, The" 
(1877), 43-4, 50-1,66. 

" Winckelmann " (1866) , 27-31, 
45. 
Robert Elsmere (Mrs. H. Ward), 

57, review on, 119, 198-9. 
"Rossetti, Dante Gabriel" 

(Ward's English Poets), essay 

on, 86-7. 
Ruskin, John, 7, 51, 163, 185, 

214-15. 

s 

"Shadows of Events" (Gaston 
de Latour), 140. 

Shadwell, 2. 

Shad well, Dr. Charles Lancelot 
(Pater's lifelong friend), 9, 10 
n. ; as literary executor, 21. 

"Solomon, The Judgment of" 
(picture), 51. 

Stevenson, R. L., 205-6. 

" Stormy Landscape, The " ("Ad- 
rastus and Hypsipyle") (pic- 
ture), 50, 51. 

" Style," see Appreciations. 



226 



WALTER PATER 



Swinburne, Mr. A., 21. 
Symons, Mr. Arthur, 21, 123. 



Tailor, The (Moroni's), 123. 
Telemachus, 26. 

U 

Uthwart, Emerald, see Miscel- 
laneous Studies. 



Verrocchio, 49. 

W 

Ward, Mr. Humphry, 18, anec- 
dote touching Pater's lectures, 



20; Fellow of Brasenose, 21; 
description of Pater, 22; as 
tutor, 25; spends summer va- 
cation with, 26; on Pater as a 
Fellow, 84, 199. 

Warren, Mr. T. H., 21, 159, 174-5. 

Watteau, Anthony, 124-5; Pa- 
ter's most ambitious creation, 
125, 131. 

Westminster Review, first pub- 
lished writings in, 12. 

Winckelmann, Life of (Otto 
Jahn), 14. 

" Winckelmann," Pater's study 
on, see Renaissance. 

"Wordsworth," Study of , 60-2; 
review of, 119. 



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